#discworld soul music

[mendedrum]

There's something very sad about an empty dressing room, like a discarded pair of underpants which it resembles in a number of respects. It has seen a lot of activity. It may have even witnessed excitement and a whole gamut of human passions. And now there's nothing much left but a faint smell.

Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

..............

im crylaughing at this stupidly amazing witty but accurate description of rockband/concert dressing room lmao. caught me out of nowhere istg.

[badkatdesigns]

FALL'S SPECIAL OFFERINGS FOR ALL THE DISCWORLD GIRLIES: SOUL MUSIC!

I'm a big fan of the Discworld novels, and this spooky season I felt compelled to lavish one of my all time faves in 3d model goodness!

September's theme: The Band With Rocks In

Each character model is fully hand painted and rigged for animation - including facial rigging for the first time. The band also come with their associated props: a guitar, a horn and a pile of drums/rocks!

For access sub to my patreon!

[notesfromtheidiotbox]

The best They Might Be Giants joke ever is in Terry Pratchett's "Soul Music," which features a band called We're Certainly Dwarfs.

[artist-bearded]

Been reading soul music by Terry Pratchett and really like this line

[dr-graf]

LET'S ROCK

New cover!

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I started reading Discworld earlier this year –because I figured it's a cultural treasure and I may as well get around to it by now– and like, I knew something about Terry's ability to sneak underhanded puns into the texts –I've seen the posts. I'd also read Good Omens, even if at that point I couldn't disentangle who was writing what.

So I entered the books fully like the Stay back, slut meme, except regarding wordplay. I was reading with a fine-toothed comb. I was squinting at every name and testing every phoneme. Not necessarily because I don't like puns or didn't enjoy the idea of getting caught by surprise, mind you, just that I'd heard very good things about Terry Prachett's humor and I didn't want to miss any of his jokes and with wordplay stuff if you don't catch it, you'll never know it existed.

I caught a lot of stuff, and even when I didn't get some of the references (the series stretches across a lot of decades I wasn't born in) I could still at least tell when he was making them. I made it out of my grand read with a pat on the back and a certain pleasure in the knowledge that I had enough pop-culture and etymological awareness to not let Terry pull a fast one on me.

In classic Pratchett fashion, turns out I was dead wrong.

I was rereading Soul Music, because even if I'm late to the party I still enjoyed the Discworld books immensely, and I got to the scene where a bunch of schmucks with no music knowledge (or talent) are infected by the spirit of rock n' roll and descend in a horde upon a guitar shop. The owner starts off trying to sell them decent instruments, but, soon realizing his new flow of customers couldn't play a triangle and are more interested in the look of the thing anyways, he promptly starts pulling out his scrappiest, crappiest pseudo-instruments (Ankh-Morpok, amiright) and sticking a bunch of paint, glitter, and ankh-stones on them for the look of things before selling them at marked-up prices.

Ankh-stones were first mentioned in Sourcery, I think, and were used in the creation of the fake Archchancellor's hat. They get mentioned in other books on and off as a source of bedazzlement that's pretty clearly meant to be a riff on rhinestones. First time I read about them, I went "oh what a nice little bit of worldbuilding, of course some gems would get named after local stuff" and thought no more on it. But like…

Ankh-stones.

Rhinestones. Rhine-stones.

The infamously nasty River Ankh that flows(?) through Ankh-Morpok, and the River Rhine, a real river that exists.

I just about swore and hit the table when I clocked that one, because I went into the series ready for it, I was looking for it, and Terry still fuckin' got me good.

[beakerhoneydew]

Love when Vetinari isn’t even really a character in a book but he shows up for a second to be a bitch. Something’s happening in the city and he’s like “well a thing is happening and I don’t like that 🤨” and then disappears again

[moonwaterstories]

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangeous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

-Terry Pratchett in Soul Music: (Discworld Novel 16), p.152

[pratchettquotes]

"But he's...gone. It's not as though I'm ever likely to see him again."

YOU KNOW YOU WILL.

"How do you know that?"

YOU'VE ALWAYS KNOWN. YOU REMEMBER EVERYTHING. SO DO I. BUT YOU ARE HUMAN AND YOUR MIND REBELS FOR YOUR OWN SAKE. SOMETHING GETS ACROSS, THOUGH. DREAMS, PERHAPS. PREMONITIONS. FEELINGS. SOME SHADOWS ARE SO LONG THEY ARRIVE BEFORE THE LIGHT.

"I don't think I understood any of that."

WELL, IT HAS BEEN A LONG DAY.

Terry Pratchett, Soul Music

[stupidphototricks]

Drawing an unexpected line between Granny Aching and Death: Two beings who can't be anything other than exactly what they are, but who vaguely worry that they don't quite fit what their grandchildren want or need them to be.

Death, with the bony knees and the all-black garden and the logically-constructed tire swing. Granny Aching, with the boots and the pipe and the not looking like a china shepherdess.

Neither of them able to be the sort of typical doting grandparents who play and cuddle, but both finding their own quiet ways to connect.

Both of them loved and respected by their grandchildren but not knowing it, because the lack of communication goes the other way too.

These awkward family dynamics that are so real and beautifully imperfect.

[creativenicocorner]

...lately I've been thinking a lot about Susan Sto Helit. Specifically her introduction and farewell in the Discworld series.

About how her introduction in Soul Music is through the eyes of Miss Butts who goes on describing this recently orphaned girl as:

"something frankly unloveable about the child. Academically brilliant in the things she liked doing, of course. But that was just it. She was brilliant in the same way that a diamond is brilliant, all edges and chilliness." *

And then the very last we see of Susan within the Discworld series, is in Thief of Time, ending with... well no matter one's personal opinion of Susan and Lobsang Ludd... the Death series ends with love. ( I could go on a tangent about how each Death book is about some version of Love but thats for another time)

ANYWAY the last we read of Susan is:

"She put the chocolate in her mouth, and shut her eyes. A faint cardboard-y sound made her open them. The lids were lifting on the boxes of stars. They spilled out, and whirled up into the shadows of the cupboard, brilliant against the darkness, a galaxy in miniature. Susan watched them for a while, and then said: "Alright, you have my full attention, whoever you are." At least, that is what she meant to say. The peculiar stickiness of the nougat caused it to come out as: "au-rite ou av my full at-em-ntion." Damn. The stars spiraled around her head, and the cupboard's interior darkened into interstellar black. "If this is you Death of Rats," she began. "It's me," said Lobsang. Tick! Even with nougat, you can have a perfect moment."

It ends with love!! Love for a girl who was described as "something frankly unlovable" we bid farewell to Susan in the series with a Perfect Moment!!

Does this mean anything? Do you see the glimpses of what I'm feeling and barely managing to articulate?!

*Please forgive me if the quotes aren't entirely accurate in terms of punctuation etc, I only have the audio form and transcribed it while listening.

[mendedrum]

Never a good idea to give a monkey the key to a banana plantation.

-Munstrum Ridcully & Ronald Saveloy

standard ankh-morpokian proverb

[badkatdesigns]

B A D K A T D E S I G N S

YEAR IN REVIEW 2024

Did a ton of animation and VTuber models this year! I'm really proud of how much I've grown as an artist/designer over the past 12 months!

I've added a little breakdown below the cut :)

January 2024 : Scott Pilgrim Takes Off! month My favorite piece from this collection was Envy Adams's funeral fit from the anime. The look really spoke to me, and I enjoyed pushing the more stylised look of the textures. Available for Patrons.

February 2024 : Sakizo month Both designs I chose from Engraved Witch for this month are really good, but I think this one of Julietta as the Fire Element x Archer turned out just that little bit better. Available on Patreon and Ko-Fi.

March 2024 : March of the Faeries / Voyage of the Unicorn 1 I wasn't a huge fan of either of my models for this month, but I was immensely proud of the custom VTuber avatar I made to present the video! I really enjoyed painting all the textures and getting all the wings on her face to move. Available on Ko-Fi.

April 2024 : Mythological Creatures / Voyage of the Unicorn 2 I always do a serious set and a Homestuck set for April, and even though my Eridan model fucking rocks, I had to pick this gorgeous sphinx as my favorite of the month. I had a lot of fun researching her, and I think she came out looking top tier. Available on Patreon and Ko-Fi.

May 2024 : Mermay / Voyage of the Unicorn 3 I redesigned an older concept off the clock to better work in a short animation I was planning, and this gif was part of the proof of concept. I love everything about it, from the color grade shift to the new textures and character design.

June/July 2024 : Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree / Pride Special Another case where the VTuber model turned out better than the finished animation-ready models. They didn't turn out bad per se - I just didn't like them as much. Available on Ko-Fi.

August 2024 : No Theme I took August off to focus on animating Reefside Rumble, the short I started working on at the tail end of May. By this point some of my actresses had gotten back to me, so I was experimenting with facial animation and lip sync. I spent most of the month blocking and animating around half of the shots.

September 2024 : The Band With Rocks In / Soul Music 1 I decided to do another 3-month seasonal theme for autumn, this time choosing to focus on the Discworld novel Soul Music. In September I worked mostly on The Band With Rocks In, the band that forms when the power of rock music suffuses the Disc. This was my first real success with custom built facial rigs, and essentially added facial rig building to my character pipeline. Available for Patrons.

October 2024 : Death's Domain / Soul Music 2 To be seasonally appropriate with Halloween, I worked on Susan Sto Helit and her two animal sidekicks. I had a lot of fun working on these characters, especially Susan and Quoth. Susan's facial textures were a breakthrough for me in terms of using the layer paint add on I have on Blender, and I used what I learned with Glod's texture work to inform how I painted the layers on Quoth's wings. Available for Patrons.

November 2024 : Unseen University / Soul Music 3 For the final set of the Soul Music themed season and the final set of the year, I wanted to design some rocker wizards. The full final animation I made with them actually features all 3 wizards, but the gif centres on the Dean. I got to take a break in between working on the wizards to design some fake band merch, and that was super fun. Available for Patrons.

December 2024 : No Theme I took the final month of the year off to work on my portfolios, look for jobs and celebrate the holidays with my husband. In between all that, I managed to design two new characters - this one, Bellona, is a barbarian. To close out the year I spent an afternoon animating her swinging her giant battleaxe.

[p4nishers]

mobius m mobius and loki laufeyson in loki // expert from soul music by terry pratchett.

[unseenwizzard]

Death: belief and hope are pointless and justice is made up

Also death: I saved hogswatch just because. no real reason. still literally heartless I swear. pls be nice to me susan. u can keep the rat. I love u. u can play my ribs like a xylophone if u want

[dr-graf]