Evil is treating people like things, Granny Weatherfax, #discworld Carpe Jugulum

For those of you who haven’t been reading my tweets: Three weeks ago now I developed a serious case of sciatica that kept me (mostly) in bed because of the pain for a day or two. Luckily, it seems the cause is NOT a herniated disc and I now consider myself fully recovered. I will have to make some life changes to minimize chances of this recurring. Like REALLY getting some regular exercise. I’ve also ordered an ergonomic chair.

However, as you can see, I’m able to write again.

I’ve fallen in love with Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Kept me with something interesting to do when nothing else was possible. This is one fantasy series where Good always wins from Bad and where ‘headology’ (understanding of people) seems extraordinarily well developed.

Managers who give criminals a second chance by giving them a new identity and a run down post office to revive (Going Postal
). Witches who teach other witches by stepping back and having the right person take the lead.

A place where, in general, people are never treated like things.

Do you all agree with Granny Weatherfax? Can evil be summed up with ‘people are things’? I’m sure it goes a long way anyhow. See Carpe Jugulum for the details.


In the mean time some blog management issues:
A lot of comments have been stuck in moderation over the past weeks. I was unable to check them. I’ve approved most of them now. The ones that I haven’t approved were either not relevant to the blog topic, or simply caught in the spam filter for whatever reason. This last bit is unfortunate, of course.

There’s one thing all you non-spamming regular readers can do to get your comments approved without me having to interfere: use the words in the title in your comment. In today’s case for instance, it helps if you use words like ‘evil’, ‘things’, ‘people’, ‘Granny Weatherfax’, ‘Discworld’ and ‘Carpe Jugulum’.

This is because any popular blog gets way more spam comments than real ones. My blog is no exception and if it weren’t for Akismet – the wordpress spam filter – I would have to turn comments off completely.
However, every once in a while human beings write in a way that look like spam to Akismet. If you’re lucky, your comment will merely go into moderation, where I’ll see it and approve it.
If you aren’t lucky, your comment will be one of the hundreds that get labelled as spam. And – I’m very sorry about this, but it really can’t be helped, in that case there’s no saving it. I can’t go through it all. It’s just too much work.

So, please, if you want your comment to go through: use some of the words in the title of the post in your comment. If only to say that you’d never heard of Discworld 😉 It also helps me see that you’ve actually READ the blogpost in question. With some recent comments you just can’t tell otherwise. And those are the ones in danger of permanent deletion.