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The trick with Discworld is that the author got much better, and much more into actually-pretty-good-takes social commentary, as the series went along. The first few books ("The Colour of Magic" and "The Light Fantastic") are really funny but not really representative of his work as a whole. It's best to think of them as a sort of alternative-universe thing. I'd actually not bother with them until you read a good chunk of the rest of the series.

Every Discworld fan has their own recommended reading order, but I think a good starting point are these books:

"Wyrd Sisters". This introduces the series' witches, who are awesome and not exactly what you might think when you hear "witch". Their thing is that they try to avoid doing magic by instead doing psychology (what they call "headology"), because the latter is more effective in the long run. If someone is magic'd into doing something, they might stop doing it when the magic stops. But someone who thinks that something was their own idea might keep doing it. Imagine a mix of Hamlet and Macbeth, directed by Charlie Chaplin, and written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.

"Guards! Guards!". This introduces the City Watch, the police of the biggest city on the disc. Of course all cops are bastards. Which all the cops on the Watch would agree with. The Watch are down to three members, led by an alcoholic named Sam Vimes - and then they get a super-keen recruit from abroad who's the most stereotypically super-earnest-and-super-buff farmboy you can imagine and who has no idea what trouble he's gotten himself into. They drunkenly stumble into a plot by influential people who want to fill the long-vacant position of King through deeply-stupid-in-retrospect means. It's a D&D campaign written like a hard-boiled detective story.

"Soul Music". This is one of the Death novels. Death is a major character in the series. But he's actually a very personable type. He doesn't really kill anyone, he's just around when it happens, to help the soul involved move on. This is not the first Death novel, but it's the one I feel is the best introduction to him. More importantly it introduces his granddaughter-by-adoption, Susan. She doesn't technically have Death's real DNA, but she's got a kind of DNA-of-the-soul, so she has his abilities and has to fill in for Death while he's... going through some things. A musician is supposed to die in a barroom brawl, but he doesn't because his soul is being sustained by the music. Susan's job is to make sure he moves on to what comes next. Susan doesn't really want to because she, and the rest of the city, are utterly enthralled by the spirit of rock-and-roll that he's brought to the world. Shenanigans ensue. It's Blues Brothers a la Tolkien, and it is a ride.

Give the DNC a time machine, and their solution to preventing the American civil war would be to encourage black people to become slave owners.

When the British House of Lords says to tone down the bigotry...

It's almost a cliche at this point to recommend Terry Pratchett given that he's one of the most famous recent authors in the english language and is particularly known for his comedy. But one of his books that's been at the forefront of my mind for the past few years - and especially the last few months - is Jingo. On the surface it's a lighthearted and very funny book, easy to breeze through in an afternoon. But the underlying topics it handles are quite serious. Nationalism and militarism, the use of propaganda both overt and subtle, imperialism and colonialism, racism and other bigotries, they're all put under the microscope. I think Pratchett's takes on those topics are good ones.

Of course there's the usual caveat that Pratchett likes his cops, and portrays them as the heroes of the story. But it is a work of fiction after all.

One of the reasons I love Go is because the language's designers took a lot of lessons learned from Plan 9 and even improved on them. For example, that easy cross-compilation is also in Go. As is the lightning-fast compilation.

I now desperately want to see a David Lynch adaptation of a famous anime or manga. I don't care which one, so long as he has full creative control.

Comedy equals tragedy plus time.

The United States is as much a child of France as it is of Britain.

This is the basic gripe of Democrats the country over. The Democratic party absolutely sucks at between-election messaging.

I thought the problem was their between-election inability to actually do anything.

That's nonsense. If Joe Biden really restored the soul of America in his image, it would now be a land of tattered infrastructure, systemic bigotries, fealty to Wall Street, and the pigheaded denial of geopolitical realities and climate science would be rife.

If Yemen's PR teams don't immediately mock this for all its worth I'll be disappointed in them.

And oh my god, the ship that plowed into the docked one was named "Chiddingfold". That is the most ship name imaginable.

What if I have musical anhedonia?