A lot of what travelled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. By contrast, the encoding of Pratchett’s name into the fabric of the internet seems a fitting modern homage, as though millions of computers were whispering his name, and chuckling softly to themselves.See terrypratchett/ for more information.
And millions of RIP tweets will soon be lost, like tears in rain. GNU Terry Pratchett is not fan graffiti, plastering the author’s name all over the public-facing internet – the tribute is invisible unless you know how to look (“view source” on a browser).įor a digital literary monument, it’s surely much better to avoid the kitsch of a Facebook memorial page. But the modern world enables a crowd-generated homage of unique subtletly. Statues, of course, were long the memorial of choice: the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is honoured with a bronze effigy sitting outside his favourite cafe, the Brasileira in Lisbon. And thousands of peasants lined the streets to see Tolstoy’s funeral procession. Shortly after the death of Voltaire, a bust of him was put on display, drawing great crowds eager to see his face. In the past, literary tributes have taken more visible form. “If you had to be dead,” thinks a character in Going Postal, “it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground.” And so Pratchett is, in a way.
The code is called the XClacksOverhead, and it sets a header reading “GNU Terry Pratchett”. What better way to remember the beloved inventor of this fictional system, then, than “GNU Terry Pratchett”? Reddit users have designed a code that anyone with basic webcoding knowledge can embed into their own websites (anyone without basic webcoding knowledge can use the plugins for Wordpress and other platforms).
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