Dream with Our Eyes Open

Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms by Terry Pratchett

synopsis: wherein we meet the ankh-morpork city watch, led by one disillusioned captain sam vimes. dragons, secretive professional guilds, and variously chaotic magical citizens abound.

as promised, getting started on discworld! (i did read the wee free men years ago as well, but i don't remember much from it.) i'm having fun so far! the first book got me used to the world and the writing style, and then i enjoyed the second book even more. a lot of the characters delight me, in particular death lol. i want to try writing pov changes at the speed pratchett does them.

spoilery thoughts

• i had a series of realizations about the title of Men at Arms as i went along. "Men" at Arms (non-humans, Angua who is not a "man" in multiple ways)... Men at "Arms" (the introduction of a gun; the idea that assassins don't do "unarmed" combat)...


• also the moment when i realized "gonne" is just "gun" 😂 before it became obvious, i thought it was going to be part of a word like chaconne or something


• it sort of surprised me to see vetinari out of sorts so soon in the series (when he gets shot at in his carriage, and the guard rescues him). he came across as so omniscient and in control in all of his appearances before then. i don't know if it'd feel different going in publication order, like if maybe you'd see even more of him before that point? but maybe i was just fooled by his early appearances


• i was excited to see sam vimes' boot theory of economics because i recognized it from tumblr screenshots haha


• and carrot and the patrician so cordially making arrangements for the future of the watch at the end??? what a pair

not related to the books themselves, but i don't really like the kobo books app. i didn't realize when i bought the bundle that i wasn't going to be able to get the books onto the e-reader i already own, so i've ended up having to figure out how best to read kobo books without a kobo e-reader. it had me trying to figure out why i'm fine reading fic in my phone browser but not books in this app. i think it's that flipping through page by page on a phone-sized screen makes the chunks feel too small, as opposed to scrolling continuously?

Death-Head's Deals by ninuiente
on tumblr and webtoons (mature content)

synopsis: this is basically a serial webcomic about a really nice hitman with bunny ears. alrick works as a "death-head", which means people can make deals with him to do anything - "retrieve this package", "kill all these people", etc - and as long as it's completed through a death-head, all resulting activities are legal. in exchange, the client must be willing to pay whatever price the death-head sets. it's like making a deal with the devil, except the devil is just some guy who does this as their full-time job, and there's a whole organization of such guys. for the average citizen, death-heads are just a scary part of normal life. (also, as with alrick's bunny ears, all characters in this world are humanoid with some level of animal characteristics.)

it was entertaining, but i don't think i'll follow along with future updates. on one hand, i do like the concepts of some characters and a lot of the character designs. on the other, i feel like some character moments needed more buildup and/or more depth.

spoilers: what i'm thinking of here

dio cutting out alrick's tongue (sudden, jarring but also weirdly casual?), joon talking about a traumatic deal (again, brought up somewhat casually and then never mentioned again)

this does make sense, considering that the creator has stated she's coming up with it as she goes along. i think i want it to be less episodic and disconnected than it is.

i also don't care about the romance storylines very much. they can all be summarized as: a nice young lady in a desperate situation consults a male death-head, and then she deals with the challenging power dynamic inherent in owing this man whatever he asks for in exchange. the details are different, but the broad strokes are too similar for me. if they're all going to be m/f, you could at least have a female death-head one time! shift around the power imbalance and who gets to be violent! i think some of the side characters hint at the possibilities, but the main romances do not.