So I’m reading Discworld.

Every once in a while I’ll retroactively understand a reference. There’ll be something weird or out-of-place in a movie or a book or a game I enjoy, so I’ll kind of already know it’s a reference to something. Since it’s amusing or interesting enough in context, though, I won’t hunt down the source, and eventually forget about it. Then my travels will bring me across the original thing the reference came from and my crazy head will be all “Ooooh, now I get it.”

So was it with Twoflower the tourist from the first Discworld book. My mistake for not exposing myself to Discworld until a couple years after playing Nethack. Nethack is a fantasy-style computer game with warriors and wizards and elves and such. You pick one of these fantastic characters to play and battle hundreds of monsters. One of the classes you can pick is the Tourist, who starts the game with an enormous amount of money, a camera and a Hawaiian shirt. Such a hilariously out-of-place character in the depths of a dungeon always tickled me, but of course I was being tickled in a different way than the people who had already read Discworld and knew about Twoflower, the hilariously out-of-place tourist visiting the depths of every dungeon on the Discworld.

Well, now I’ve read The Color of Magic and I get the reference. Retroactively.

Discworld has always existed in my peripheral vision. I played through the old PlayStation games years ago, have always enjoyed the characters of Rincewind and Death, and understood the dream-world logic behind concepts from the role-playing game such as “plans with a one-in-a-million shot at success succeed nine out of ten times”. I even once admired an exceedingly yummy-looking Discworld cake. Picking up and reading the books is something that’s occured to me from time to time, though it’s not until just now that I’ve actually done anything about it. I wasn’t at all surprised to find that The Color of Magic was every inch as entertaining as I figured it would be.

The Light Fantastic is sitting here on my desk, ready to go, and I figure the rest of the series will follow suit. I figure there’s about a one-in-a-million chance I’ll have read them all before the next A Song of Ice and Fire book comes out.