The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 83: Only You Can Save Mankind (It's A Bit Early To Radicalise You)

Episode Date: May 9, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, usually read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 1 of the Johnny Maxwell Trilogy - “Only You Can Save Mankind” Beige Keyboards! Beige Monitors! Beige Tech all the way!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFret Facebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Roe vs Wade Aid Access - based in Austria, provides access to medical abortion by mail (to US and worldwide)National Abortion Federation (NAF) (hotline: [phone])Donate to local abortion fund (compiled list by The Cut)Guttmacher Institute - research and policy analysisStates with trigger laws (and details)State legislation trackerThings we blathered on about: Vampire world record attempt - WhitbyThe Internet Speculative Fiction Database Terry Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind": The Musical [full album] - YouTube Y2K bug - Britannica4.4- Jerusalem's Rise and Fall - IBM via Web ArchiveWitness the last moments of Asheron's Call, a 17-year-old MMO - PC GamerVideo Games - ephemeral podcastJourney To Alpha Centauri in Real Time - An Interactive Waste of Time - Spectrum ComputingCopy protection - Wikipedia The Legend of Shambhala (Shangri La) - Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia Pratchett answers OYCSM questions - alt.books.pratchettMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

we're not going to go into this in depth, because it's extremely depressing, we need to stay like mildly hyped. But the Roe vs. Wade travesty has happened recently. And so we're going to put a few links to resources in the notes for anyone who might need them or might need to share them with other people. Yep. And then we feel like we've done very slightly more than zero. It's a low bar, which might help us sleep at night. See, yeah, the Dracula vampire record attempt, I thought was an interesting thing that the

listeners might like to know about. Help us break an official world record with the Abbey English heritage is going for a Guinness World Record attempt as the largest gathering of people dressed as vampires. Okay, so like it's a Guinness World Record attempt, but like, does that mean there's already been an attempt of a massive gathering of people dressed as vampires? Yes. The current world record, would you like to guess how many

it is? I'm going to go with lots. Good. I'm going to be ready to try this about this. Many, many lots. Oh, yeah, correct. 1,039. Amazing. So English heritage trying to get more than 1,039 people to come to Wiby Abbey dressed as a vampire on what was the date?

26th of May, 2022. I want to go. So it's at the birthplace of Dracula, the 125th anniversary of Bram Stoker's iconic novel. So I guess at the cathedrals. But Wiby Abbey, sorry, is what is where he started writing it? Well, it was Wiby. He was like inspired to write Dracula when he was walking the

Wiby cliff sides and things. And so Wiby then also features very heavily in the book. Is that where all the goths go then? That's why Wiby goth festival is in Wiby, yes. I had what I still feel was a really good idea for writing at 2am, like half asleep. And I cannot is not coming back to me now. It's too late, but that's so annoying.

It's really annoying me. Yeah. Do you not do the notebook by the bed or the notes in your phone though? Yes, I do have a notebook by the bed and I do have my phone by the bed, but I have a real issue getting back to sleep if I've really woken up. So it's, it's if I wake up in the morning, I'll write it down,

but generally in the middle of the night, unless it's like, I need to file my taxes, I probably won't write it down. I am, it turns out fully capable of putting these notes in my phone while I'm still asleep or like just waking up to put it in my phone and going back to sleep. I'm quite lucky. So I do enjoy looking at some of the things I've written sometimes. I haven't got any good recent ones apart from a donkey up

minaret equals NFTs from a recording jingle. And I still don't know what I meant, but I stand by it. Yeah, absolutely. I think that might be an axiom. It might be. I'm not sure what an axiom is. Oh, it's like a, a truth. Yeah.

It's what you base philosophy around. Oh, yeah, like I'm sure you told me that. Yeah, when we, yeah, but that was back when we did pyramids and we were talking about like ancient Greeks and paradoxes and stuff to do with tortoises. And that's all left my, that was over a year ago, Francine. Yeah, but you'd held on to that knowledge for like 15 years and then just forgotten it after you told me, I see.

I think I had to reteach myself some of it. Plato's cave is the only one I remember and only because I got really distracted by the idea of like a puppet show and not about the nature of reality when we were originally studying it. Yeah. Cause then the teacher was like, it's basically like what the matrix is about. And I was like, oh my God, but what if you did the matrix with puppets?

Yeah, what if? Like I would watch that, like imagine the matrix, but it's like a Punch and Judy show. Um, well, we've not seen the matrix proper. No, neither of us have properly watched the matrix. So we might have to do that before we work on the adaptation for real, but I'm into it as a concept. The other cool thing I just discovered, like literally today is

I may have found this before mentioned it completely forgotten about it, but the internet speculative fiction database, it's just an online encyclopedia thing of all the speculative fiction titles. It's like, so homepage at the moment is also born on this day, also started on this day, but then like the database has also directory, award directory, publisher, magazines, statistics, all of that.

No, that was really useful. I was looking for some old reviews of this book. Yeah. And you can say mankind, which I fucking failed at and I couldn't be bothered because I got distracted by this. Um, and yeah, so I linked back in the show, this seems like a resource that both of us and probably a lot of our listeners will use.

Awesome. And it's got a pleasingly old fashioned aesthetic. I didn't look up any old reviews or any of things for this. I don't have a quick look at annotated Pratchett, which pointed out that you'll benefit greatly from having seen the film Alien. So now I have to admit to the listeners, I've never actually watched the film Alien. I haven't either, but I have watched Jack play the video game

for a long time and I get the idea. And I've seen enough clips from it. Like I know. Yeah, like, like I get references to it. I, uh, I played a massive ball game that was blatantly a rip off of Alien and that I hated. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I don't feel ashamed of not watching it because I'm

not going to watch it because it's a horror movie. It's a horror sci-fi and I can't watch horror. I sometimes feel like I should have seen some of these things. And then I remind myself that life is ephemeral and fleeting. And then you get the question, can't be bothered. No, it's more like it doesn't matter what films I should or shouldn't. I have to keep reminding myself of this a lot, like on the internet recently, because everything is terrible.

So I just have to focus on things like the Met Gala, which is like the good kind of terrible. Right. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say, is that better? I mean, it's better, obviously. Yeah. Whenever I'm sad, I just look at a picture of Blake Lively in that dress.

Blake Lively is a public service. Right. So Ryan Reynolds is in Blake Lively's husband, is the only man who gets a pass for going to the Met Gala and just wearing a plain tuxedo because like, why would you want to doing anything else when you're standing next to that? Yeah. I mean, you just have to, you have to act as a moonday.

You just reflect some of the glory. Exactly. He gets for all the other men who wear plain tuxedos, I'm judging. It was a real waste of, because it's the Gilded Age, wasn't it? It's a wasted opportunity for these men to wear a top hat. Well, it's Gilded fashion, but the reference was to Gilded Age. There was at least some reference to like the white tie stuff. Like, did you see Stormzy in Burberry?

I did. I didn't see him in the main pictures, but I did see him afterwards on Twitter. So I was like, why isn't this picture everywhere? And I was like, why isn't it? He looks so good. He does. And that was fun, because it was like, it didn't need to be massive and golden shiny.

It was a reference to the white tie thing, but also big and high fashion and dramatic and had a cape. I want that outfit. Does Lil Nas X go to this, if not he should. He has in the past, but I don't think he was there this year. I don't know if I'm imagining that. Billy Porter wasn't there either, and Billy Porter is always amazing. Yeah, no, I know Billy Porter, Kinky Boots.

Yes. He for the year where camp was the theme, genuinely like dressed as an Egyptian god and was like carried in on a litter by six glistening goldman. That is. I feel like that goes through camp and all at the other side, but fine. Yeah, good. I just want to enter a room like that around. I just really want to enter a room like that, like once.

Well, I think as soon as we've gotten our cult going. Yeah, I was thinking for my birthday, but like the room's upstairs. They're really narrow stairs, dude. No, I know. I had to try and say that like implies that they're slippery. Yeah, all right, let's not put slippery men up. Anywhere. Slippery, slippery men.

Right. We haven't. We haven't done this for like two weeks and I've forgotten how to podcast. Yeah, sorry, listeners, we're a week late because we both scheduled things and then Joanna's internet broke. So we lost our one window of opportunity. So it's not my fault though, it's BT, so fuck them. Well, yeah, everyone assumes you didn't take to the router with a mallet.

You've not gone that far down the frustration rabbit hole. And then they threw my computer out the window. Luckily, my computer was quite heavy. More of a motivation to lift your chair is creaking again. Fuck, sorry. Apologies, listeners static. I can't not move. It swivels front scene.

I'm trying so hard not to just twirl all the time. Don't do that, you're attached to the computer via wire. Remember when we worked in tele sales and we got those wired headsets for the first time, we kept standing up and nearly dragging the whole computer off with us. Yes, that was good. So I think I was the first one to do that, obviously, because it was. Me and me back in the day when I was drunk. No one was listening to listeners, but everyone was drunk at that job.

No one was sober. No one was sober, you can't do that sober. I don't know if you want to buy a solar panel. See, that sounds ridiculous because I'm sober. I am currently sober. I'm currently drinking a coffee and hello, are you interested in fateful tech? So fuck, I can't say it. Exactly, exactly.

You sound like a buffoon. I sound like a buffoon often, Francine. Speaking of which, shall we make a podcast? Yes, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to The True Shell Mickey Fract, a podcast in which we are usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one as time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan.

And I'm Francine Carroll. And today we are not talking Discworld. We are talking about only you can save mankind. It's true, listeners, only you. Literally you, whoever is listening to this now. This is the first book of the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. We are continuing our terrific trilogies season. Yes, we are.

What was the first one again? Oh, the Bramillian. Yeah. Note on spoilers before we crack on. We're a spoiler-like podcast. Obviously, heavy spoilers for the book only you can save mankind because we're talking about the whole thing. Yeah.

Possibly mild spoilers for the next two books in the trilogy, but I doubt it. I've forgotten what happened in them. But we will avoid spoiling any major future events in the Discworld series. We're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel. The Shepherds get crowned until we get there. So you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. In a virtual spacecraft controlled in your dreams.

Marvelous. Yeah. Have we got anything to follow up on? Yeah. So magpies. Yeah, I spotted something elsewhere in the Oxford Superstition Dictionary thing, which was under bus tickets. So as you can tell, I was just opening it randomly again instead of sleeping. Yep.

1952. In Hell as a Schoolgirl, the rhyme one for sorrow, two for joy, going up to seven was always applied to the numbers on tram tickets. The number was added up and divided by seven and the rhyme applied to the figure remaining. So that's fun. I like that. Get on. Another girl saying the same with the bus ticket.

That's enjoyable. I enjoy that. Right, let's talk about Only You Can Save Mankind. Do you want to introduce us to the book, Francine? Sure. So Only You Can Save Mankind was published in September 1992. This is after the start of Discworld. We've got a little sojourn.

A little sojourn. It is a kids book, a young adults book, kids book. It was shortlisted for Children's Fiction Award. It made it into some of the adult reading charts, as well as the kids' reading charts, same as a couple of the Romelia bookstead. It's been adapted a couple of times. It was adapted into a radio drama in 1996. It was adapted into a musical in 2004.

The soundtrack of which is available on YouTube, so I'll link it in the show notes. Unless that's illegal, in which case, forget I said that, don't see me. Who ever made that? I did not know there was a musical. There's a TV adaptation, as well, isn't there? Yeah, like parts of it were adapted in a drama way to go with a documentary. I've not been able to find that. Yeah, that's why we're not covering that, listeners, because.

I had a look and I've seen you had a look as well. And I just, if it's available, it's going to take many hours of me looking and I can't be bothered. So, yeah. The blurb is as the mighty alien fleet from the very latest computer game thunders across the computer screen. Johnny prepares to blow them into the usual million pieces and they send him a message.

We surrender. They're not supposed to do that. They're supposed to die and computer joysticks don't have don't fire buttons. It's hard enough trying to save mankind from the galactic hordes. It's even harder trying to save the galactic hordes from mankind. But there's only a game, isn't it? That's quite interesting, actually, because blurbs can often vary from addition to addition, and I know we don't have the same one.

But mine is word-for-word the same, apart from it ends up don't fire buttons. I took this from L Space because I put the dust jacket from my edition somewhere. And also, I did all my notes on the ebook version because I just have every version of things now. I also have the audiobook, but I barely listened to it. So that was a waste of a credit. The version I'm using is the 2004 paperback, in case listeners following on, but we won't be comparing page numbers much

because, A, we're doing the whole book. You and I have very different versions. So your version doesn't have the four word, does it? It doesn't, no, but yours does. So if you could read that bit for me, that would be brilliant, please. Yeah. So like I said, shouldn't author change a book that was published years ago? It's not usual. Our books are done and finished thing,

sort of picture of the time in which it was written. No one expects Tom Sawyer to have a skateboard. Psy, but I bet he'll be given one one day. So I haven't made many alterations to this book. There's no point in giving your dad a pair of new rocks, pushing him into the mosh pit and trying to pretend he's 14. But maybe there are one or two things I should point out. Only you can save mankind was written during the Gulf War,

not the one we've just had, which was the sequel, but the one more than 10 years ago. I hope no one intends to make it. Computers were just getting powerful enough to run realistic looking games. At the same time, people were watching the first video war. Every night, the news showed the views from bombsite cameras in what look like live action, often presented by General Storming Norman Schwartzkoff, who was in charge on your computer, games that look like a war on your TV,

a war that looked like a game. If you weren't careful, you could get confused. Our mobile phones weren't that common, at least for kids. In fact, it's not a big deal. Our mobile phones weren't that common, at least for kids. If you're away from home, you had to use a phone attached by a wire to the wall. It was terrible. I love this little footnote as well.

For anyone reading this in 2014, new rocks were a cool boot that was across between footwear and an armoured car, cool in 2004. And maybe they still are. The mosh pit was that bit right close to the stage at a punk or heavy metal concert where all the stomping goes on and heavy metal was, I'll go and look it up. I have definitely worn new rocks in a mosh pit in the past. I've never owned a pair of new rocks, not being a goth myself,

but I have enjoyed a mosh pit all too much time. Generally in skate shoes or DMs, the latter is better. Yeah, I don't know what happened to my new rocks. I think I lost them in a move, but just I enjoyed possibly people in 2014 needing to know what new rocks are. He is. And shout out to Steve on Twitter who dug his out for the special occasion of reading the book. Oh, super.

It's nice to know they're still around. Yeah, actually, I was just thinking my talking point later is about a computer-y stuff and kind of involves a bit of scene setting and just a couple of bullet points. I think I might put here because we're going to be talking. It's going to be more relevant to what we're talking about. So just a general setting the scene for anyone who doesn't remember 92 very well like us. I was born. Yeah, so this was being written 91, I guess.

Yeah, early 92, but so general idea. We're in the age of the Apple II. We're in the age of the Commodore 64 IBM PC clones, not computers I've used. Fucking love the aesthetic. I've got this keyboard that's made by the same people, but it's brand new because I just fucking love that stuff so much. Proper spring, spring later. That's good.

So 89 Game Boys first released, not in Europe till 90. 1990, just video game idea. We've got Metal Gear 2, Super Mario World, Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. 91, very exciting year. We had Wing Commander 2, which Pratchett has talked about playing before. He said in one of the groups actually he'd played Elite, Wing Commander, X-Wing and altogether too many outer space shooting maps, which is why the book is reminiscent of many of them. Final Fantasy IV, Mega Man 4 and Linus had just started.

Work on Linux, the internet was switched on with nothing on it. Visual Basic was released. Yeah, that's the time we're in an exciting technological period. It's a fun little, there's a couple of little time capsule moments I noticed. And one of them is the fact that Johnny has a computer for playing games on in his room and then is using an encyclopedia to do the research for his schoolwork. Yeah. I liked the line about learning new technology at school,

but getting in trouble if you used it for anything. Yeah, which that had passed by the time I was at school, like we were allowed to hand in typed things. We weren't in middle school and yeah, no, you could in upper school, I think. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm pretty sure I did my, yeah, no, I definitely did my coursework on my computer, but I think I still had to hand write stuff in middle school.

It was within the phasing period, I think. Upper school, I got in trouble for handing in handwritten stuff, especially when it came to like essays and coursework. Was that because you were a terrible wanker and they were trying to tell you off for that? No, it was because I left it to the last minute and wrote most of it on the bus that morning. Oh, okay, fair. Now time to then type it up and print out. And funnily enough, I didn't get A-levels.

No, no, you did not. I'm an example. Right, should I tell us what happened in this? Yeah, God, I've got something in my arm. Sorry, I was blinking like a maniac for years. Sorry, I love it. Just heads up listeners that I'm not doing super detailed summaries for these. I recommend actually reading the books.

Yeah, I mean always, please. I mean always, preferably, yeah, but especially for these, because I'm not going to do a whole book that would be two pages of summary. Yeah, I would just wander off halfway as entertaining as your summaries are. So in this book, Johnny Maxwell sits down to play Only You Can Save Mankind, only to receive a strange message on the screen. We wish to talk. The scree we are surrendering.

During these trying times, Johnny promises the pixelated protagonist safe conduct and dreams of his spaceship until he dies defending them. Out in the real world, the game's alien ships are gone for everyone. Johnny sees a mysterious girl complaining at the game's shop. His friends blame him for the strange glitch while at night, he continues to dream of saving Screewee. As the Screewee captain and gunnery officer find themselves at odds, Johnny's temperature rises and fever dreams of the Screewee war take place

as the captain shows him deaths and demands food. Johnny makes a decision. In his dreams, he takes food to the Screewee friends in tow and fights off the other players still flying through the stars. A mysterious ship waits and watches and flies beautifully before killing Johnny, but not before hearing his voice. Johnny goes looking for the girl from the game and the computer shop and interrupts his friend Big Mac's evening plans to enlist his help.

A car crash that Big Mac should have been a part of sends him spinning. Meanwhile, the Screewee captain faces a mutiny from the gunnery officer and the alien ships head back to fight the players. Johnny finds the mysterious Kirstie again in game space and makes it to her place, convincing her to help before passing out. They both wake in game space, having dreamed their way on to the Screewee ship and head to the bridge in time to take down the gunnery officer, outfly the humans and reach the mysterious border the Screewee had been searching for.

After a final confrontation with the furious gunnery officer, Johnny and Kirstie slash Sigourney make it to the escape pod just in time as the Screewee head for the border leaving game space forever. I like it. That was very concise. That was more concise than usual. Thank you. That's what I was going for. So. Helicopter and linecloth. Yeah, that's right.

Helicopter. Well, helicopter. I feel like we've got plenty of flying things to choose from. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to go with literally any spaceship. It's basically a helicopter. Okay. No, no particular one. No, I decided to keep it vague because I forgot to write anything down. Okay.

For loincloths, the film they go and see, Alabama Smith and the Emperor's Crown. That sounds like a film that's probably got a loincloth or two in it. Sure. Yeah. No, that sounds, it's Indiana Jones. Yes, I'm assuming Alabama Smith is Indiana Jones. Yeah, I can't remember. I was just trying to remember if there were any loincloths in that talk quotes. Do you want to go first? I think yours is first.

My quote is everything made sense a bit at a time. It was just when you tried to think of it all at once that it came out wrong, which is very applicable to many, many, many situations from the very serious, like this one to the when you suddenly like 10 hours deep in a project and you're like, none of this. None of this made sense. I've just built a house of nonsense cards. Yep.

I have to knock it over and start again. Relatable. Yeah. I like that quote. I think it's a good quote. I enjoy that. I stupidly picked a really long one. Not stupidly in that it's a bad quote or anything.

It's just I'm struggling to speak today. So we'll see how this goes. Yeah, well, we are recording a podcast. So you'll have to get a hang of it again at some point. Sorry, listeners. I haven't spoken out loud for like three days. They tried to talk to you and you didn't even listen. You were the only other one that got that involved.

You were so mad to win. You slipped into game space and you'd mean so much better at saving them than me and you didn't even listen. But I listened and I've spent a week trying to save mankind in my sleep. There's always people like me that have to do stuff like that. It's always the people who aren't clever and who don't win things that have to get killed all the time. You just hung around and watched.

It's like on the television. The winners have fun. Winner types never lose. They just come second. It's all the other people who lose. And now you're only thinking of helping the captain because you think she's like you. Well, I don't care anymore, Miss Clever.

I've done my best and I'm going to go on doing it. Very good. I just really like those moments where someone completely breaks down on those desert and has a massive rant. What? Recent book that we've read and what character. Did someone just have a proper shut up moment at one of the protagonists because this was really familiar for me.

And I couldn't think where it was. It wasn't half a jugulum. Was it? Am I thinking of nanny slapping Agnes? You might be thinking of nanny slapping Agnes. Actually, that makes sense. Okay. Similar vibes.

Not quite the same. Yeah. Yeah, I think it might be. Okay. Should we talk about characters? Sure. Let's. Who have we got?

Who are we starting with? Well, I feel like we should start with Johnny as this is, according to the front of my book, a Johnny Maxwell story. Is it? It is. It is. It's Agnes. Yes.

I don't know why I'm saying that in a mysterious time. It is not a big surprise to anyone that he is the main character of this book that he is the main character of. What a nice little chappy. What a nice little chappy. It's just a decent sort. I like Pratchett's way of writing the sort of every man-ish type protagonists. Yeah.

Like even he describes himself as, no, I was the other one that you didn't notice. Yeah. Pratchett in one of his forum posts said, Johnny's anything but a traditional hero who doesn't step in. He's dragged in throughout the book. He seldom does anything he wants to, but because the situation is dropped on him and then being Johnny struggles to do his best to deal with it. It's like a non-cowardly rinse wound.

Also 12 years old and dealing with trying times. Trying times. I'll talk about the trying times a bit more later. But yeah, it's just very human. I know this is something obvious about Pratchett books in general. He writes people, very, very human people very well. But it's nice when you read something. I'm very, very human reptile aliens.

I'm very, very human reptile aliens. It's nice seeing it when we do like his young adult books. And this is like, I'd say more on the young adult side than the kids side. Like it's quite dark in places. Well, yes. But so good kids books. Oh yeah. Good point.

I suppose it's where you blur the line, isn't it? I'd say it's perfect for a 12, 13 year old, 10, 11 acceptable, 8, 9 pushing it. Depending on the 8, 9 year old. It's a very good book. It's a very good book. I think it is simple enough to be understood by younger kids. But probably not until you're a young adult. You get a lot of the emotional depth to it.

Yeah. That sounds a bit wanky. No, I get what you mean with a lot of this podcast. That's fine. I mean, if you think that's wanky, the point I was going to make is that when you read his kids and young adult stuff, it really, really distills the stuff he does very well, like writing humans incredibly well to like a really pure essence because a lot of the external, especially a lot of the

external like disc world is stripped away from this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all very, it's not because it goes into outer space and but it's almost like a few bottleneck episodes mashed together. Isn't it? Everyone's in it.

You're in the spaceship, but you're in the very small world in comparison. Anyway. Yeah. So I enjoyed it. And then who else we have? We have Wobbler. Wobbler. What a name.

Good lad. The kind of boy who's always picked last when you had to pick teams. The wobbling was glandular and he is a computer genius of sorts. Yeah. Very insistent. I do like the line because it's like a little Pratchettism thing if he's got this close up of a microchip on his wall and his grandad says why hasn't he got giggles and garters and there's something about girls,

giggles and garters that comes up a lot in Pratchett. I hope and I bet someone has made like a fan cover idea of that. And if not, we should. I'm sure one exists somewhere. Yeah. I meant to Google see if that post is real. I bet it is. I'm pretty sure that the Silicon chair of not the girls.

I know. Yeah. He's another is another decent sort but isn't the same characters stamped again. So isn't he's a nice sidecoat. I noticed with like the four boys that kind of make up this little group. So Johnny Wobbler, Yolus and Big Mac, they're not the same characters, but you can really tell from this that Pratchett wrote a lot of the them

in Good Omens. Yeah. Like it's the same. It's a very specific way of writing that kind of age group that he does really well. Yeah. So sure. And the thing is you can point at it and be like, well, it's very problematic

that the fact kid is called Wobbler and then all the stuff like Yolus that I'm about to talk about. But it is also exactly how 12 year old boys treat each other. Yeah. I think it's a shame he didn't get to write more groups of kids because I think he does it very well. Yeah. He makes realistically.

It doesn't make you want to stick pins in your eyes. Yeah. So not very realistically, but you know, it's like the obviously it's not the same age group or really gender, but it reminds me of the Georgia Nicholson books and how like effortlessly it's done. It's not cringy. Like even the really stupid slang stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's it's not necessarily it's it's not it's not going to have you rolling on the floor if you're not in that age group, but you can remember very well and saying stupid shit to each other. So yeah, Yolus is quite an interesting one of his nickname comes based on a lack of stereotypes and we could sit there and go, Oh, it's already racist and problematic, but like, and I don't think Terry Pratchett's pointing at it and saying this is a really good way to behave.

He's been very realistic about how people behave with each other. The nicknames, the kids nicknames in general are great, nearly crucial and MC Spanner. Yeah. And Johnny eventually admitting that he's often called rubber. Oh, there we go. It took me a second as well. Just to clarify for our listeners, this a rubber Johnny is a slang term

for a prophylactic. A condom. I don't know. There we go. I don't know why I've suddenly got very prissy about this. A little spot places, shall I? I'll be the prude this week. No, wait.

You blush whenever we mentioned that. You won't be able to tell if I'm blushing. I've got like five inches of face of foundation on. It's better if you blush. The conversation they have after going to the Alabama Smith and the emperor's crown of what we're calling it racist and Yola saying he enjoyed it. So then they have the argument over.

It could still be racist if yes, which is this kind of conversation you have and there's a nice light line. There's a very funny line later on where Johnny was at Yola's and his mother can't complain because they're good liberal people. She approved of him on racial grounds. Yes. And again, like, got to remember it's the 90s, like early 90s. I guess this is probably it's the first wave of parents who were like

that really. Yeah, the sort of if you approved before on racial ground, it made you a radical liberal. Yeah, now it's it's sort of moving into the liberal parents. Guardian. Well, your parents maybe. Our parents generations are. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but yeah, very much my mom actually. Yeah. So the Guardian readers. Yeah. There's another line later on. I think we're not saying my dad is racist by the way. He's just like a proper communist. He's racist.

He's a communist. They aren't connected. I just not a liberal. How the fuck did we get down this problematic rabbit hole? It was my fault. Let's dig ourselves down further and talk about Big Mac. Sure. But on a classist basis this time.

Yeah, we've definitely got some classism here. Whoa, that was a dark bit. Whoa, right? Whoa. Before we get to the before we get to the dark bit. I just want to throw in Big Mac's theory that Ronald McDonald is like Jesus Christ, which was fantastic. Do you want to read a bit of it?

Look at all the advertising. There's this happy land you go to where there's lakes of banana milkshake and trees covered in fries. And then there's the hamburger. He's the devil because I love the description of him coming out with this big slow statement that suggests some deep thinking had been going on. Like he's sort of the detritus of the group. And I mean that in a very complimentary way.

Yeah. Yeah, he's a good person. It just takes him a minute sometimes and it comes from greater debts when it does. But also it's the kind of stupid conversation you sit and have for a long time. Absolutely. I would say when you're kids, but you and I and our friends still

often get into this kind of conversation. It's not unheard of. Yeah, I skiffing past the dark bit very briefly. A similar moment I thought was when he says, oh, my brother's stupid. Yeah. When the guys are talking about like, oh, was it before or after?

It doesn't matter. They're talking about, yeah. It's after that dark bit. But yeah, they're talking about the war and everything. And he's like, oh, they deserve it. And they're like, oh, no, actually, because this and then he's just quietly thinking for a minute. He's like, oh, yeah, I know.

My brother's a dick. Got it. It's nice seeing it. But yeah, so the actual dark bit, the car crash and starting with, you know, Johnny turning up because we don't see Big Mac in this context before that. You get the hints of, you know, it's the tower block and people have got Rottweiler's and don't tell you if someone's in until they know who's

asking. Rottweiler's and our staffies. Yeah. I love Rottweiler's. They're lovely dogs. They are lovely dogs. As long as they're, you know, people honestly cut their ears off. Well, yes, there is that.

When Johnny approaches Big Mac outside the pub and there's this kind of code switching moment, like once the kids leave in the car and you see Big Mac relaxing and swaggering less. Yeah, I think we all knew a guy a bit like that as well, who looked much older than 13, 14, wherever we were and would hang out at the pub with completely different scary for people, but like was still a kid at school. And yeah, no, it's again, it's very familiar character. I think perhaps it's pretty good at distilling these kind of experiences.

But yeah, God, it's just, it's fucking dark. I really wasn't expecting it in this book. No, it's very, and again, I think this is one of those bits where reading as an adult, you might initially think, well, this isn't suitable for children, but then reading as an adult, you kind of have to read it twice to make sure you read what you read. And it's, there's no detail to the point where it would upset a child. You have to know what he's insinuating.

Yeah, I think it would go over a younger kid's head, like an older kid, I think, working out, but that's not necessarily. Again, like 12, 13, and you can cope with that then. Yeah, generally. It is really interesting bit to put in as well, isn't it? I think showing the reality again, showing the reality of like a high speed crash of people dying in real world, not just in the dream world where again, people dying was like a thing.

It's a really good point in the book to put it as well, because Johnny has become so involved in this game world that is real, but is, is that one removed from reality and kind of lost touch with the really firm solid ground and something like this. You know, he's trying to explain this stuff and he's freaking out and Big Mac says, you know, you don't really know anything about real life. And Johnny's saying this is all about games. They've both got really good points.

Yeah. Because obviously this is incredibly real to Johnny, but it's not as real as what Big Mac goes through and witnesses. Yeah. And even they, you know, Johnny has got his issues at home and obviously he's not taking care of himself and someone else should be taking care of himself. It's got a reminder that that's on a very different level than some

of his friends. And I think it does a really good job of showing the kind of the class differences you can have in a group as well. And then that's kind of compounded with what's at jobs. Kirsty, Sigourney. It's the other end of the spectrum to a certain extent. Yeah. The other end of the like normal kids spectrum.

Yeah. We're not like boarding the school. Yeah. No, that was another line about liberals. I quite liked is she brings Johnny up to a room and says, don't worry, my parents are liberal. Yes, stay away. My parents are very liberal.

You can hear her staying out of the way. Speaking of Kirsty, actually, I obviously there's a lot to say about the way the boys talk about sexism. And again, it's not like some of the earlier Pratchett books where it's like it's not parody. If you're just doing the thing like here, it works. Yeah. It was quite hard to read at points because she's so much that character.

Like so intense dialogue is like, oh my God, you're giving me a headache. Like she's not likable, but that's fine. I don't think she's meant to be. Yeah. The describing her as that comes under the sale of goods at 1983. Up until now, Mr. Patel had never met anyone who could pronounce brackets. Yeah.

Like, oh, Kirsty. And it was very interesting contrast. Yeah. Just in the complete. It's not that Johnny doesn't have motivation, but his motivation is very reactive rather than proactive. And yeah, it's like Sigourney, Kirsty is always. Storming ahead.

Always thinking about what she is trying to achieve. It's a nice counterpoint to have to Johnny because she doesn't quite come in and save the day, but she does make coming in and saving the day a lot easier, if that makes sense. Yeah. Although she changes the world around her to make it a bit more difficult to. Well, your word, wouldn't you? No.

I do all the time with you and I am not as competitive as you. Yeah. I think perhaps you relate slightly more to her than I do. Yeah. She's not likable, but I do find her quite relatable, although not to the point where I'd actually take the name Sigourney. No, and also you are massively conflicted about us. I just mean that the kind of wanting to succeed at things.

I think you've got a bit more drive than me. Yes. I basically constantly look for tiny hope dopamine hits of little buttons going, well done. Speaking of the Sigourney name, I guess is a referenced alien. So don't worry. Listen, it's called that. Yeah.

And we got the cat one too. Wait, what was the cat one? I didn't get that. Oh, she said, if I see a cat, I'm going to kick it like one of the plot points in alien as she goes back to get the ship's cat. Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Thank you.

Between us, we almost make one complete pop culture reference. Yep. And then the captain. What a bad one. Well, sorry. Am I the sexist? Are you? I don't think so.

The doctor was a woman. Ha! The captain and the gunnery officer don't have names, which is quite an interesting kind of thing when you're looking at this and when you're looking at the anonymity of the people you're shooting at, they still don't quite reach the point of being named as characters. No, that is interesting.

And probably partially because you can pronounce it, but they get around with that with everything else. Well, yeah, I mean, they managed to communicate, don't they? Yeah. The captain gets a couple of really good moments though. One of my favorite descriptions is the captain had a nasty way of talking in a reasonable voice. Yeah.

Just kept saying statements. Wish I could be that. I wish I could do that. But you know, when you're on the receiving end of that and you just are willing to like full on cry. Oh, yeah. Jack's like that in the very few occasions where like we have a proper disagreement for more than a second.

It's very difficult because he's so level headed. Like it's probably good in a home environment. It's hard to escalate, put it that way. That is good. However, I still struggle with it because just I cry at conflict. Oh, yeah. So easily. It's so annoying.

Like I was upset. Please ignore what's happening with my face right now. My face is just doing this. I liked the physical descriptions of her. I like the complicated shoulders, the forearm shrugs. I like that there's no attempt at making her into an object of weird alien desire. Yeah, she's not sexy.

I like as well. No, hang on. That was a different place. Oh, the teeth birds. That's what I'm trying to say. I love the teeth birds. I like the teeth birds. There's just a nice little detail.

It doesn't need to be in there in any way, shape or form, but it's just lovely. And she has a and like, and it's just a tiny little bit of world building. I was like, because you keep your teeth birds on your person and you let them out and. And they're quite intelligent. It's a fun little thing.

It's one of the things that makes Pratchett such a good writer is that he puts in details. I wonder if because there's always this ambiguity as to how real this is, as in, is there any structure to it outside of the kids imagination? And I wonder if like the teeth birds are half remembered from the picture and psychophedia or yes, quite possibly. And we have the gunnery officer.

What a twat. What a twat. I do like one of his lines, though, where the captain's reminding him of the other races that have been destroyed the waterroids and the megazoids and the galaxa. Nope. And he refers to them as very primitive, very low resolution. Oh, I did like that.

Yeah. I'm going to start using that for stupid people. They're very low resolution. Actually, no, that's not to me. It's like social Darwinism, isn't it? Never mind. I'll just dig the twats. Yeah.

UKIP voters, very low resolution. Yeah, the gunnery officer is a dickhead. He is a dickhead. He's very, he's mutinous. That's a mutiny that was. That was a full on mutiny. We don't like mutinies. And he got shot.

Yeah, the whole scene of him, the last, the big crescendo of the book and then making it onto the bridge and realizing that he's been shooting his own people. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The moment of like, again, this little cold moment, wasn't it? It's like this confrontation of death is like what's previously been this abstract thing of ships blowing up now being a person,

admittedly an alien person, but still a person in front of you with a hole in them. Yeah, that's it. The theme throughout. I saw one review. There are a couple of like, obviously there's lots of block reviews still and there was one review of this book is like, like, obviously the big theme is death being treated like a video game

and not being treated realistically. If you ask me, it's a bit heavy handed. I was like, it's the kids. It's like, come on, dude. If you want, like, beautiful amounts of nuance, go read like almost any disc world book. Yeah. But you can't even know the nuance and nonsense.

And nonsense. The new comedy duo act from the 1970s. The new new from the 70s. Yep. Good. Anyway, locations. Locations. So game space.

I'm not going to lie. Love it as a concept. I mostly put it in as a location to squeeze in an extra quote that I really loved. Oh, cool. Which is the description of destroyed alien ship. It drifted along absolutely dead, tumbling very gently. It was green and vaguely triangular except for six legs

or possibly arms. Three of them were broken stubs. It looked like a cross between a spider and an octopus designed by a computer and made out of hundreds of cubes bolted together. Yeah, just the concept of the and the difference between playing the game when your computer and dreaming and being in game space is these two different spaces.

The kind of delineation of it and game space space space. I like the kind of concept as well as this being this like something's like a parasite universe thing. If I'm going to keep using like desk well terminology. That's a yeah. Parasite universe is a really good term for actually it's not quite parallel universe because it relies entirely on on these kids.

But then it's not it's not like dumbed in dementia. Obviously. Yeah, I felt like we shouldn't think about it too briefly in case we give ourselves headaches because I know what we're like the border. I just really like this is a final moment of the book where you realize the border they're heading for is the game over screen.

Absolutely. I take it your book your copy has the black screen. With game over on it, doesn't it? And then the very last page has new game. I had a quick look just out of interest when the game over screen like first popped up. So to speak. And like really early apparently was the phrase game over

was used as early as the 50s and pinball machines. I was assuming they had its origins in in arcades and yeah, but like pinball. Yeah. And yeah, and then obviously became as we would now see it in the arcade games and then followed by the new game, which is quite fun because obviously I've been learning with Unreal Engine how to do like heads up displays and stuff.

So I've been making the old like game over screen and it's quite satisfying to be able to trigger it. So like a noise plays and game over comes up game over. What's what noise to use? It depends on like which asset pack and sounds that I've already downloaded for different games. So shall we talk about the little bits that we liked? We could give it a go.

We could give it a try. So the first thing is just kind of a general another scene setting thing another in the vintage moment. I just love that there's fucking digital clocks everywhere. It wasn't that moment that was really a moment wasn't it? Because digital clocks became a thing for a couple decades there. Now they're gone again.

We've got clocks on our phones and yeah, we've got clocks and I've got I've got a digital clock. I guess on my lungs. I've got one of those sunrise alarms because I'm a wanker, but the the old, you know, the red text six three equals glitchy things. And then I saw a line about there being a clock on everything like the thermometer and this temperature is half past four.

Yeah. And the catalog was like the golf umbrella was it was just that era of like tech means adding this to everything. Yeah. Add a clock to it and it's a lot more innocent than now, which is tech means adding smart features to everything. It's like, oh, I'm glad I can't afford a small toaster. I don't even have a normal toaster.

Oh, I wouldn't mind a red dwarf one, but I don't want one that tries to order bread. No, the concept of a smart fridge stresses me out so much. God, yeah. Anyway, yeah, I don't really have much of a point about that. I just liked it. Another kind of dated scene setting thing I noted and didn't cram into my notes anywhere was when he's talking about his

like social education classes. I don't know if they can't think of anything else to talk about. They talk about AIDS, which really, really firmly puts this in the early 90s. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We must have covered AIDS at school, but I don't remember when. Oh, right.

Yeah. Yeah. We didn't cover that. Was the party line still they deserved it? Oh, I think they went with let's just not talk to them about it. So we don't have to say that. Fine. But yeah, I mean, do you know, again, you're

you went to Catholic schools. So there would have been no chance of this. Someone pointed out the other day and I never really thought about it considering how much I think about this usually. The consent was never really covered in sex ed at school. No, weird. Like, well, I mean, our sex ed consisted of one RE religious education class where they went, these are all the different

forms of contraception. And this is why specifically each one is evil. But the teacher is going to get them cheap. Yeah. The teacher was at least good enough to very quietly say and if I'm only allowed to teach you the Catholic perspective, here's every sperm is sacred from Monty Python's meaning of life. Here's your worksheet about evil contraception.

And if you have any more questions about contraception, please come and speak to me and I can possibly give you some directions. Yes, be very careful not to go to the local clinic and get free condoms. Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. But yeah.

Anyway, sorry. What was I saying? Yeah. The yeah. I mean, it's RE, isn't it? Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Well, we did have like social education, but I don't remember

what we were taught in it. I think it was lumped in with RE for us. No, for us, it was separate. Oh, it was PSHE, personal social health education. That went with RE somehow. I think we learned a bit about sort of how voting and things worked. I'm not even, when I say I'm not sure we covered that. I'm not, no, I think I went to most of those classes.

I scribed a bit of school, but I don't think I've scribed that because it was an easy one. I didn't scribe much in GCSEs. I didn't really start scribing to low level. Yeah. Does it count to A level? No one's going to check up on you. Oh, no, they did.

They like, didn't they? Yeah, it was horrible. Yeah. Anyway, sorry. None of this is relevant. Clocks everywhere though. Clocks everywhere. Fuck all this.

Clocks. I just really love them talking about the different words and whether they're cool or not. Yeah. Is it rad to say cool? Cool is always cool. No one says rad anymore. At one point, Johnny refers to the phrase totally splanked,

which I love and I'm going to start using. I recently heard the phrase frowning Jesus as a curse. I think it was on Jack's video game and I'm going to start trying to use that. What lax? I enjoy this. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a splank. Yeah.

I think I meant to say dweeb instead of nerd now. Was it earlier? Yeah, that kind of thing. It's dweeb or nerd or one of the two. Johnny and Kersi are like, oh, you don't say cool or wicked. It's not cool. What about vode? Vode's cool.

I made it up. Still cool though. Doesn't matter. Which is a nice compliment, isn't it? Yeah, I like that. Darling, you look so vode. Oh, no. Yeah, that kind of stuff do kind of matter.

I don't remember any of the like really specific words that we use growing up. Like a lot of my teen lexicon probably came from the fact that me and all my friends read the George Nicholson books. Yeah, I'd like 12, 13. No idea. I'm sure it was nonsense. I know the school I went to had like a bit of an upper middle

slant, which meant the slang was also a very weird mix of, you know, the posh kids that try not to sound posh. Yeah. Rar, have you seen my backie? I really like those TikTok videos from people taking them piss out of all these cool kids. I'm like, am I bullying teenagers vicariously? Do I care?

We're not actively bullying them. Rar, Mindy, where's my backie? Mindy. Mindy. Have you seen my North face? Oh dear. We're terrible people. What interesting thing about this actually, as compared to

say ready player one. Yeah. I like how uncool the characters are. I'm like, yeah, American writers often try and do like an uncool character, but they're secretly cool. You know what I mean? Like the kind of people you do like text role play fan thick stuff where it's when you were a teenager.

I was like, yeah. Oh, she was such an outcast with her hair pulled into a messy bun and her whatever. But this is like, yeah, he's got like a t-shirt with a biro slogan written on it and he looks like a toast truck in camo trousers. Exactly. Genuinely uncool, pretty teen boys as we all were except not

always boys. Good. Good words. Excellent. We're not doing great on the sentence front. I'm going to, I'm going to admit it. This is going to take a bit of editing and I can only apologize to our patrons for this entire debacle.

I'm going to apologize to you because you have to edit this. Well, yes, but that's a problem for future you. Yeah, exactly. Future me. Fuck that guy. That's Sunday morning. Whatever. Anyway, I, uh, I stole your quote about dead space invaders,

which I'm very sorry about. Oh, that's all right. You're better at reading aloud than I am. But did you have any more you wanted to say on the topic? No, I just, I just, I just like the concept. I like the concept of taking these 2d. You've never really thought about them characters, villains, whatever and turning them into this dead world law.

Like that's the only, not the only thing, but the main thing I've really enjoyed about old sci-fi and about like strata in particular. I really liked and like, I know that's like a parody kind of thing, but I really like the whole ancient civilization, but on a cosmic scale. Yeah. Yeah.

No, that I really enjoy. And particularly the idea of this kind of unified game space that all games live in out there somewhere with dead space invaders and the pixely t-rexes from Tomb Raider just sort of floating. Yeah. I know the pixely t-rexes went in space, but I don't think they're actually in the Great Wall of China either.

So yeah, who knows? Right. Um, check on to the Friday. They thought there Friday the 13th. Yes. I put it in because it reminded me of one of my favorite bits of technological law. And this is a bit later than this book, but the Y2K Panic.

Did you even try and look it up? Cause I just googled it and there's like 10 things at the top for Friday 13th virus. No, I just put it in cause I want to talk about the Y2K Panic. It's the Jerusalem virus. It's quite interesting by the looks, but anyway, sorry, tell us about Y2K. I know it's after this book.

It's just something that's always weirdly fascinated me because I always thought of it as something of a joke when I was younger, just like the fact my father literally worked in computing and had to deal with some of this shit. Yeah. Well, it was like pop cultured, wasn't it? Like there was, there was Millennium Bug Haribo. Yeah.

It was made fun for kids. It was made fun, but it was a genuinely serious, very worrying thing that people did a lot and when obviously nothing happened and I was like, see, it was fine. I was like, that's because people did a shit ton of work. As with so many things, it is you're telling us we overreacted because we stopped the bad thing happening. Because we reacted the right amount.

But the basis of it was that computer, a lot like up to the 90s, a lot of computer programs abbreviated four digit years as two digits to save memory space, because that was a lot of space at the time. So computers would recognize 98 as 1998, but wouldn't recognize zero zero as 2000. Yeah, 1900. Yeah.

So people worry that when the clock struck midnight, computers would have an incorrect date and just not fucking work, not keep track of things. And this was across everything. One of the things that was the most behind was the US government. Still is. Well, yeah. You can make a lot of money if you know how to operate some

ancient computing systems and the banking and governmental systems. Yeah. Hot tip. Slightly older listeners. Something interesting I found when I was reading about it though, a fairly impressive legal precedent was Bill Clinton signing the year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act. Oh, yeah.

It gave companies like limited liability protection for sharing information about their Y2K methods so that they could work together to stay up to date and protected without, I guess, risks of things like copyright infringement and. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So that was really interesting because that's quite a that set quite a big legal precedent of like presidential control of technical

powers that hadn't usually been addressed before. Yeah, I wonder. Yeah. So the Jerusalem computer virus, otherwise known as Friday 13th virus, the logic bomb DOS virus, first detected at the Hebrew university Hebrew University of Jerusalem in October 1987. So basically when it infected a computer, it became memory resident using a whole two kilobytes of memory.

And then I know, and then it affects every executable file run apart from command.com. Com files grow by 1.8 megabytes. What 1 813 bytes. Wait, no. So one 1.8 kilobytes, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

Everything's so small. I'm struggling because I only have eight gig of RAM and that's not enough to run Unreal Engine 5. It turns out. So this is hilarious to me. Yeah. Yeah. And it was particularly interesting because it was a it was unique

as a logic bomb. So like with a trigger. Yeah, it was set to go off on Friday 13th on all years, but 1987 and then deletes any program on that day also infects dot x files repeatedly until they grow too large for the computer. And yeah, that's really interesting. And there were like loads of variants that came from it, but when Windows basically killed it off because DOS interrupts are not

very important anymore, I guess. Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't look it up. I got very like weirdly single-minded about the Y2K thing. No, you're fine. Yeah. Yeah.

I just I didn't want too many emails. No, that's fine. Hey, I checked the emails. I know, but I don't want you to get upset while you do it. Sometimes I check the emails. True. When I remember we have emails, but the emails, but that handily takes us on from computers to video games and a bit of background

around them as we go on to the bigger talking. Oh, that's me. That's me. So yeah. So I was looking at you. You're always looking at me. We're talking to each other. Like I'm not 90% of the time looking at myself in the zoom window.

We're like little barrets. As I said, not going to do a full Potted History video games because it's not hugely relevant. Be similarly to you. I can get very bogged down in this kind of stuff. But imagine both of us would have tried to make timelines. We'd have got distracted trying to find the perfect PNG file of like a space invader.

Yeah, it would have been a thing. So instead I did the scene setting earlier and I looked into what Wobbler does for fun. He's looked into the kind of game breaking almost exactly. Oh, wait. Before we get that, I've one fun fact from the Potted History. I decided not to write, which was from the fun fact of fun analogy, which was talking about when the kind of golden age of arcade

games was ending. So like late 70s, early 80s a thing. Yeah. And I was listening to that podcast and the analogy from one of the guests there was like arcades are like blue whales. They are this huge animal, the biggest animal. But they live on krill. They live on quarters being fed in and so it becomes really apparent

when that krill when these quarters start running out and these things that seemed invincible start starving to death. And it was just really cool analogy. I liked that. It's also very weird because we're talking about arcades and what I'd say is quite an American concept like the UK arcades are a very different thing. We have the sort of yeah, we have seafront seafront penny arcades

which I love. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've got some. There's usually like a little we got some of the American stuff over, but it was very much a shadow of American culture. They usually like small things in something else like motorway service stations, bowling alleys.

Yeah. I fucking love playing the arcade games of bowling alleys. Oh, the dance machine. Yeah, I was so bad at it. Sorry. Right. So wobbler. First of all, the journey to Alpha Sanctuary that wobbler made.

Yeah. Somebody made. Did they? But it's not Pratchett referencing that it is someone referencing Pratchett. Oh, someone made it as a reference to this book. Yeah. Oh, that brings me joy. Yeah.

Someone made a game that in theory would take 3000 years a real time journey to Alpha Sanctuary. Subtitles and interactive waste of time. I was not able to download it because my computer does not run said five files. I'm not really sure what that is. No. Do at me. Actually, I was I will quite happily be educated on all of this because I fucking

side note. Sorry, I'm not staying on topic today. I fucking love the whole retro computing aesthetic. This is really going to aggravate anyone who was working with computers at the time because I sound like a dickhead teenager appropriating the banana without having listened to the CDs. But yeah, I love the look of old like old computers like the Apple series, the fucking Commodore.

I love the weird Bay boxiness middle. I just love it. I don't know why it tickles the right part of my brain. I feel a huge amount of nostalgia specifically for beige computers with the massive was it called when it's got the big bits sticking out the back of the screen is not flat screen, but agree. CRT or something. Yeah.

CRT. Yeah. The tube. Yeah. Tubi. What's it? Tubi. What's it?

Yeah. I think that's right. Cathode ray tube. Thank you. Thank you. Just beige computers bring me huge amount of this. I love it. Listeners.

I just held up my tank of a keyboard. I did go more up to date when I got my computer and got the light up keyboard and mouse that matched the computer so I can program the lights to do cool shit. You're a hacker. Get it now. Yeah. You've got you've got RGB lights. You've got a hoodie and too much.

I learn are in your class. I'm into the main frame. Having said for ages that I really love the Mac keyboard and the quiet little thuds. Now I've got a mechanical keyboard. I don't know when you're writing code and you're typing code. It also works for like creative writing. Yeah.

I don't know if you've tried it yet. I know you can write first and then you type up your notes. Yeah. Yeah. The close up come is writing recipes which isn't creative writing but it's not writing code. Yeah. Anyway, fuck well as a piracy.

Sorry. No, no, I'm sorry. So code breaking not code breaking through software cracking or breaking as it was kind of name is like piracy. It's it's getting floppy disks getting through at the beginning like floppy disks defenses so that you could copy them and give your mates copies. Yeah. Jack for instance remembers all of their video games as a kid were like pirated

versions. I think his dad's colleagues or something brought home by the time I was playing video games. I mean, it was all CDs, which were a little bit harder to crack. I think I had the odd pirate a bit of software. I think my first set of Adobe suite was pirated disk. I shouldn't say that statute limitations probably over. It was like 20 years ago.

Yeah, we had like hold the mic. No, not quite. How old were you when you first got Photoshop to young now at 16? Sorry, I just got that madness and stuck in your head. You Photoshopped too much much too young. You Photoshopped too much much too young. Now you edited a picture of yourself married with a kid when you should be having fun with me.

Software cracking. Yeah, sorry, software cracking. So it's a removal of copy protection features or adware and things, but for the purposes of this. Something you might like to look into a little bit more is something called crack intros, which is a small sequence added to crack software like a little signature, like you know how like movie studios have a 10 of them before you can watch a movie, which is one of the reasons I hate watching movies.

Genuinely, it pisses me off so much puts me off. You got like 10 different stings, whatever you call them. Um, there's usually no material benefit or something wasn't. I don't know how much of it is profitable now as with wobbler. The joy of it was really in demonstrating technical abilities. Yeah. There was big communities of these people and obviously that became more connected as the internet developed, but even pre that.

Um, on the internet, on the internet, there was an anonymous figure called old red cracker who founded a high cracking university. Wow. Yeah, which was like recognized and asked that if you put a plus in front of the user name or whatever people would know you are legit. Um, I, this also just reminds me briefly of another thought I had just about the book in general, something that really interests me about it. Internet doesn't really exist as a communication tool yet.

Like there's no social media in the early nineties, but people everywhere have become aware of this lack of ships in this one game at the same time. Hmm. I just thinking about how that spread is like angry letters and word of mouth. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Oh, that is really interesting.

Yeah. Premonition. It's just, oh, I can tell you what, you'll love this as well. I know you'll have read about it and listen to stuff about it. I love all these stories about like early MM pork stuff and like that one. I've forgotten the name of it, but that got closed down and there's been like these podcast episodes of like the last, uh, seconds of this entire universe was like recorded for the first time on this.

Um, I'll find it and I'll link it and I'll do it and follow up next week. So I fucking love that shit. Anyway, God, why am I waking up at nine o'clock at night? Um, ADHD. Yeah, that's it. And coffee. Um, so some of the just fun little trivia bits about copy protection stuff. Some of the early games used to require you to keep the original packaging

for verification. Um, so for instance, you'd have to activate it each time you booted up the game because you'd had to add a specific word from the manual. So you'd need to always keep the manual. Um, or gameplay itself would require informational hints from the manual or from the game packaging. Um, which by the way, another sidetrack. Um, the idea of having like these huge manuals for games and I was used

to love them. I used to absolutely love them when I was a kid. Um, and you don't get them so much anymore, which fair enough, especially if you download games like I do legally. Yeah. Um, legally listeners. God, I'm talking to you like you're a load of narks. Um, it dopped into a pirate police.

Um, and then the last little fun. Copyrighty thing I saw was lens lock. Have you ever heard of that? No, it's like a row of prisms arranged in this cassette sized plastic holder. Um, and so for these games that like ran on cassettes that corrupted two letter code would be displayed on screen and it'd be like separated into lines of light.

And if you've used it through this little thing, you could read the code and then you'd have to put that. Yeah, which is pretty cool. Apart from the fact it could only be read through like at the exact right resolution and say people playing these games had to like fuck with their screen settings for ages and like, oh, um, oh, also this isn't that relevant to this because I don't know if this is before that point or just about this time that started.

Do you remember buying those like game and magazines and they used to be the only way you could get solutions to really difficult parts of games? Like, oh my God, internet is so expensive. Also, uh, like physical strategy guides. Yeah. Yeah. So we, I think I've talked before about playing Tomb Raider with my family and we had the physical strategy guides that like we'd take turns.

Someone would read from it or someone else would play. I still have it. Oh, yeah. It's completely fallen apart. So it was in like a folder, like in a sheet digitize it. It's just, it's so of its time. I'm not even like, I'm sure it's a bit faded now as well. But yeah, we would buy like physical strategy guides for games.

So yeah, we'd buy the magazines because you'd also get like little demo discs with them. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, loved it. I got just remember demos, like physical demo discs with like a little snippet of a game on. I know I played the Diablo two one like a million times before I finally got

one of my parents to buy it for me. Yeah. Um, I was too young for that. Tell you that for free. Uh, but yeah. And I think that's all I had to say about that. Who can say fuck? I've certainly gotten through my bullet points.

Well done. Something we talked about a bit already, but I want to talk about because it goes into some of the biggest stuff I want to talk about. And you mentioned as well, why this is such a good kids book. And something I noted is just. It really handles the big topics well through the lens of being 12. Yeah. Um, like obviously, Terry Pratchett talks about in the four words, uh,

this being written during the first golf war. We were slightly younger than these characters during the second golf war, but of a very similar age. Yeah. Yeah. And then kind of then lingered on into the Afghanistan stuff from there. Yeah. It was just kind of, I remember it being very weird when it started.

I remember my mother like trying to have a conversation with me about it of sort of how does it feel to like be in a country that's at war? And like my full understanding of war up to this point was. World War two at school. So I was a bit like, which we were only really talked about like what English people were doing during the war. So it was like, well, there's no rationing. We haven't got like an Anderson shelter in the garden.

So it all feels pretty normal. Doesn't really feel like we're at war. I had a very politically engaged friend, uh, who went on an anti-war protest with her parents. Yeah. And so I was told what to think about it. And I still agree. Like I had an opinion.

But yes, it wasn't through much critical thinking of my own. I do like the way, yeah, like these kids come to these conclusions and the comparisons they make and the, I'm there to film on the news about the war. It's quite good. Fucking sick of it now. And then just coming to the realization that all of that, like what looks like video game footage. Yeah.

No, it's, it's, it's very kids. Did you see the war on the box last night is one of the lines that really got me like they were talking about a football match or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did he catch the wall last night? Yeah.

Um, it's very weird because I'm watching like my little nephew now grow up with the Russian Ukraine war happening. And the real online war. Well, he's, he's, you know, he's six. He's not really online. Um, he's allowed to watch YouTube under supervision, which is just fucking Minecraft videos. But I noticed he was getting like weirdly kind of not obsessive about money,

but he kept like talking about like a spot change on the side and ask if he could have it. And he was asking how much things cost. And I sort of jokingly said to him, like, well, you know, you don't need that much money. You don't need money for everything. And he was like, well, but what about the war in Russia and Ukraine? Cause we need money to send to the Ukrainian people.

And it was like such a six year old's understanding of it. And I was trying to very gently explain like, no, other people should help them. Yeah. Other people who are quite silly should be doing more on that front. Dear, but it's a bit early to radicalize you. Unless I can somehow do it through Minecraft. Oh, I was being radicalized from a fairly early age. I mean, I'll do my best.

I keep buying in Pratchett books. Yeah, that's pretty good. I would say that's a more reasonable way to do it. Um, yeah, but yeah, I mean that ties into like why I think it's such a good book is like an overarching thing. Pratchett talks to children or talks about children like they are entire people, not like they're babies or kittens or whatever. Like I'm more so in this than like proper language.

He perhaps doesn't go as heavy handed on the floor or prose or the analogy or whatever, but he it's in no way dumbed down. No, it's not. His books for younger readers are great because they don't fall into that kind of syrupy patronizing tone. And the way the kids talk to each other, like they're figuring out this whole thing of what they feel about war together. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like this, this hardship that the trying times I think has written very realistically and it's not just a trite thing. It's a it's so subtly done because it starts with just like Johnny talking about it being trying times in his father coming to be fatherly. And one of the kids, his friends kind of asked him about certain things and he says it's all gone quiet. Yeah.

And it's really subtly built up into they're not really being any food at home. Yeah. Him making do with black coffee, which you kind of in think, oh yeah, wait, hang on. It's like a fucking 12 year old. And by the time he gets to Kersti's, you know, he's dirty and he's swaying and he's eventually passes out.

He's exhausted. He's got a proper neglected kid, he suddenly realized. Yeah. And it's really subtly done the book because the books mostly from Johnny's point of view and he doesn't think of himself as neglected. Yeah. And from a kid's point of view, I think at that point still you might read that and be like, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a protagonist.

You end up in these states when you're. And he's tired. Yeah. And then it's not like you're reading it like, oh fuck, Johnny. Yeah. Like the end, I cried a little bit at the end when it was, I've forgotten the wording of it now. But when he sort of wakes up in the spare room and yeah, but yeah, it's

incredibly well done because none of it is simplified any more than it's simplified the way a 12 year old would see it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. It's simplified through a kid's eyes, not to explain it in a patronizing way. Yeah. Yeah.

And obviously, like I compared it earlier to Good Omens that you can obviously see from Terry Pratchett, right? And kids like this, how much for handy had in Adam and them, but they're more of a parody intentionally because Good Omens is. Yeah. And they're a billion. Yeah. They are those plucky young kids.

Whereas like these aren't plucky young kids. Johnny is not a plucky young hero. No, none of them are really the closest you've got is a like overly intense competitive upper middle class girl. Yeah. Like I think she's the most parody-ish out of them, but even she is still incredibly human. Like I said, I already did one of Johnny's rants earlier, but when

he breaks and loses temper, one of them is in that social education class I was talking about where he just ends up yelling at his class about the fact that it's not a game. It's not fun. Any minute they might get blown up. Yeah. And this is coming just after this realization that like it's when Big Mac realizes his brother, brother stupid.

It's this almost are we the baddies moment? Yeah. Yeah. See the conflict that Johnny is facing throughout like the whole book of is he the bad guy shooting at the screwy? Yeah. And realizing that he has been whether he wanted to or not. It's an interesting kind of meta point as well in that if he hadn't had this

fantastical experience, then he would have just bought into the propaganda. Absolutely. Like, I mean, let's not go too deep into it, but let's also not pretend like the way these walls were portrayed in the way that video games always been portrayed on to kind of. Propaganda. Yeah, the humanizing storm in Norman was very this is someone made into a character and this whole context only run like Johnny looking up the Geneva

convention because of what's happening to him in the screwy conflict. Like none of that stuff had ever occurred to him about the fact that like he thought, oh, once someone's a prisoner, they're a prisoner. And then he learns, oh, no, you've got to be nice to prisoners. And that takes him to fuck. Hang on. We're not being nice to prisoners. Yeah.

And he has to go through it that way round. I remember learning about like rules of warfare and be like, what rules war fathers made like took me quite a while to get my head around it. I must say it took me a very difficult concept for a kid. Well, and also I hated history at school. So, uh, very surprising to look at me now as you are constantly in medieval cosplayers. Well, I'm more of a nerd about history than I used to be.

Yeah. But that's because so depends on the teacher. Like I had such good history teachers. I was always very into. Yeah. And my parents were both very into history. Yeah. Yeah.

My parents weren't super into history apart from like my mom and aunt history and also like the curriculum is just plague, tuners, World War Two. History and medicine are quite like. Yeah. Who is the father of medicine? I remember that essay. Well, I don't think we did anything like that.

Well, now you're Catholic. Jesus was the father of medicine. Galen, who's Galen, pagan God, more like for humors, more like shouldn't you be reading your Bible? All right, we need to stop ripping on Catholics and get towards the point I was going to make somewhere towards the end of this podcast. Yeah. Discree we conflict and this is a parallel because it's something that's

so much closer and personal to Johnny and the realizations that are really obvious, but he obviously hasn't thought about because he's a 12 year old boy. This idea of mankind and earth are also the screwy words for the same thing. Yeah. The only you can say mankind means only he can save them. Yes. That earth is their word for their home as well. Yeah.

Same as Bramelead, isn't it? Yeah. And I just, I think it works so well to bring the kind of whole analogy together to put something that human in the shape of anthropomorphized alligators on a pixelated screen. And I remember learning just how pixely like X-Wing commander was or whatever it was called. I love how in your memory video games are always a lot higher

res than they actually were. Yeah. So I downloaded two reader two on this computer when I was the first game I put on my ridiculously expensive computer. Fuck me. I forgot how bad that was. I tried to play Age of Empires one a couple of years ago. I was like, nope, can't do it.

Age of Empires two still holds up. You'll be pleased to know. That's good. Yeah. I was worried. Of course. Yeah. The practically writing this at all, he was, as he put it, here we go.

I do know that for me, the plot of this book flowed very easily. Mind you, I was very angry when I wrote it. I'd seen too many real deaths being presented as video game footage. And I think as would say many of us, but you can see the anger very much in it. Yeah. Sometimes bursting out through Johnny, but sometimes just in the reasonable points he's quietly making throughout just like the captain. Just like the captain.

All right. We're leaving it there because that was a really good connection and I can't improve on it. Let's get obscure. Let's get obscure right at the front. Page one is the Gobi software advert thingy. Oh, yeah. And in there, there is the address for Gobi software.

And what I was looking through the various net things I found Pratchett explaining a annotation I haven't seen anywhere else. So I was pleased with my little digging or kind of hinting at it. So why is someone asked, why is Gobi software? Why is Gobi software's address in Tibet? And Pratchett says, ooh, ooh, I know this one. Please miss. Ooh.

Um, the address is a highly mystical one and surprised. ABP hasn't rooted it out. Check out the names. Very strange place for some software to originate, but maybe not if that's software designed to change your mind. So I Googled a garter drive. Shambhala Tibet. It's a it's Shangri-La.

Yeah. It's, um, it's a place of enlightenment wisdom piece somewhere amongst the, the peaks of Tibet or possibly underground in the Earth's core. And there's a whole very interesting law legend behind it involving a hundred Kings and, and the world ending quite soon in ruin. So I'll, I'll link to that. I've also just noticed, uh, I hadn't read all the small print on this little bit, the, the like game intro thing, uh, suitable for IBM, PC, Atari, Amiga,

pineapple, Amstrad, Nintendo, actual game shots taken from a version you haven't bought. Yes. Very recognizable even today. Yes. I enjoyed that. Right. I think that's everything we can conceivably say about this book.

I think yeah, we've, we've gone way out of our remit and not all of it was coherent. Please enjoy. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the true shall make you fret. Let us say good of you. It was very kind of you. We will be back next week to talk about Johnny and the dead.

The next book in the Johnny Maxwell trilogy. Uh, in the meantime, of course, you can follow us on Instagram at the true shall make you fret on Twitter at make you fret pod or Facebook at the true shall make you fret. Join our subreddit community r slash T T S M Y S F, uh, email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks and albatrosses, the true shall make you fret pod at gmail.com. And if you'd like to follow us financially, although why you would after

this, uh, it's fine. They've forgotten short memory stands. All these video games is great. If you want to pay for our video game habits, please go to patreon.com for slash the true shall make you fret and exchange your heart and pennies for PowerPoints. Another bonus nonsense. I just put up a recipe for chocolate brownies.

If that tempts you that good, I can make them. And in the meantime, dear listener, new game, Y slash N. I plan on being a lot more organized in my thoughts for the next two. They're kind of easier to talk about. It's not as broad a theme as war. Cool. What's the next theme? Death.