on the street · in a crooked city · the morning halfway across it · walking widdershins
A shopfront on the street, in a city where nobody matches
Widdershins
Against the way of normativity: a Discworld appreciation, walking against the turn.
In Ankh-Morpork you can be whoever you want to be and sometimes people laugh and sometimes they clap, and mostly and beautifully, they don’t really care. Do you understand this? Dwarfs now have seen liberty. And that’s heady stuff.
Widdershins is an old word for going the other way round, counter-clockwise, against the course of the sun. It comes from the Middle Low German weddersinnes, which Wikipedia’s article says means, literally, against the way. That is the whole of this room’s subtitle, and the word got there first.
On Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, where the world is flat and turns, there are four directions rather than our four: hubward, to the middle; rimward, to the edge; turnwise, the way the world turns; and widdershins, against it. This room is a thank-you note to those books, from a street of people who have been going widdershins all their lives, mostly without a word for it.
It stands in a city that is not quite Ankh-Morpork and could not be anywhere else: crooked, crowded, smoky, built on top of itself, beside a river too thick to drown in, at the moment the Disc’s slow morning is halfway across it. Nobody in the city matches anybody else. That is the city.
A city that never matched
Read the books in order and you can watch a writer change his mind. The early ones laugh at the usual things fantasy laughs at; the later ones keep coming back to the same city, and the same question: what happens when everybody who was told they did not belong turns up and stays.
his later work is driven by a commitment to inclusion and a rejection of hegemony
Karl Spracklen and Ian Lamond, writing about the fans who argued over the television adaptation of the Watch books, call Ankh-Morpork a crucible. Not a melting pot, where everybody comes out the same. A crucible, where things are changed by meeting each other and nobody stops being what they were.
how cities such as Ankh-Morpork serve as a crucible for agency even if social structures continue to limit that freedom
Which is the argument against neuronormativity, made in a fantasy city by a novelist, and in the words of Sonny Jane Wise that our glossary quotes:
It is the assumption that there is a correct way to exist in this world; a correct way to think, feel, communicate, play, behave and more.
Inclusion, when it assumes uniformity, is not inclusion at all.
Creativity is driven by divergent perspectives, and squashed by demands for conformity.
The Watch is a competency network
The books about the City Watch begin with a night watch nobody wants: three men in a city that has stopped expecting to be policed. By the end it is a team of nearly every kind of person the Disc has, and it works because nobody on it is the same. That is a competency network, and it is the thing our own pages most want a team to be.
A competency network is a map of the gifts people bring to each other.
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Sam Vimes
from Guards! Guards!, 1989
Wears boots with soles so thin he can read the city through them, and knows which street he is on by the cobbles under his feet. Nobody taught him that sense; the city did, one night at a time.
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Carrot Ironfoundersson
from Guards! Guards!, 1989
A human raised by dwarfs, who is a dwarf because that is how he was raised and what he says he is. He has read the city’s laws all the way through, and believes every word, which turns out to be a kind of power nobody had planned for.
-
Detritus
from Men at Arms, 1993
A troll, taken for slow by everybody, until he is somewhere cold enough and his thinking turns out to be brilliant. The fault was the temperature of the room, never him, which is the social model of disability with a cold store in it.
-
Angua
from Men at Arms, 1993
A werewolf, whose nose tells her who has been where, and when. She spends a great deal of effort on not being seen as what she is, and the Watch is where, slowly, she can spend less of it.
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Cheery Littlebottom
from Feet of Clay, 1996
A dwarf and an alchemist, who brings a bench of chemistry to the Watch House, and who begins to live openly as a woman among dwarfs, where nobody says. She wears what she likes, and the dwarfs of the city have to get used to it.
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Dorfl
from Feet of Clay, 1996
A golem, made to work and to be owned, who comes to belong to nobody but Dorfl, chooses its own words, and joins the Watch.
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And more
from the later books
By the later books the Watch has a vampire, a zombie, a gnome and an Igor too, and a commander who has stopped being surprised by who knocks.
Different kinds of minds see different parts of the world. A competency network lets those different views work together. What one person misses, another catches.
This is not about ranking people. It is not about who is better or worse. It is about fit, trust, and seeing each other clearly.
A group with multiple neurotypes doesn’t just survive more threats — it does things no single neurotype could do alone.
Nobody on that list is fixed. Nobody is cured into a human, or a man, or a dwarf who keeps quiet. What changes over the books is the Watch House, which keeps being rebuilt around whoever walks in: a cold room for a troll, a bench for an alchemist, a commander who learns, slowly and complaining all the way, that the person he did not expect is the one who sees what he missed.
First Sight, and recognising ourselves
The witches have a name for the way we try to work, and our witches page has quoted it since 2024:
First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right.
Open your eyes, and then open your eyes again.
First Sight is seeing what is really there rather than what you were told should be. A great many of us were told, for years, that what we noticed was wrong, too much, or not the point. The Disc is full of people whose senses and passions are the point, and the later books treat them as what they are: what each of them brings.
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Vimes, at six o’clock
Thud!, 2005
Reads Where’s My Cow? to his son at six every evening, whatever else is happening in the city, and will not let anything make him miss it. A routine kept like a promise.
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Angua’s nose and Vimes’s boots
the Watch books
A world mostly smelled, and a city read through the feet. Senses most people do not use, used all the time, and nobody in the books asks either of them to stop.
-
Detritus in the cold
Men at Arms, 1993
The same troll, slow in a warm room and brilliant in a cold one. Change the room and you change what everybody thinks he is.
-
Stanley and the pins
Going Postal, 2004
Loves pins, and then stamps, with the whole of himself, and the Post Office runs better because the person who loves them most is the one who knows.
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Carrot and the laws
Guards! Guards!, 1989
Read every law of the city and holds everybody to them, the powerful included, because nobody told him he was not supposed to.
-
Cheery and the bench
Feet of Clay, 1996
Alchemy, the way most people never look at anything: closely, for the pleasure of it, until it says something nobody else heard.
We recognise ourselves in these people. We do not diagnose them. They are fiction, and putting a label on somebody who cannot answer is the thing done to us often enough that we are not going to do it to anybody else, as Star Stuff says of their author. Recognition is the other thing: finding yourself on a page that did not know you were coming, and being glad of it.
Miss Level stores it in other people
Our witches page is about care work, and it rests on a passage from A Hat Full of Sky in which Miss Level, a witch, explains to Tiffany Aching how a witch gets paid, which is that she does not. What she gives away comes back round, from somebody, some time, and she helps whoever needs it whether it does or not.
I store it in other people. It’s amazing what you can store in other people.
You can’t not help people just because they’re stupid or forgetful or unpleasant. Everyone’s poor around here. If I don’t help them, who will?
That is mutual aid, said better than most of the books about mutual aid say it, and it is how our own mutual aid is meant to work. Nobody on the Disc is helped because they deserve it. They are helped because they are there.
From Star Stuff
Star Stuff, our science zine with Helen Edgar’s More Realms, spent a whole issue, No. 49, One Atom of Justice, on what this site owes to Discworld, and an essay after it, A Promise, Not a Finding. Both are CC BY-SA, like this street, so some of them is here, with its drawings, and the rest is one link away.
There is no atom of justice in the powder
In Hogfather, Death answers the hardest objection anybody has made to a site like ours. Grind the universe down and sieve it and you will not find justice in it, or mercy, or a molecule of and therefore you belong.
TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY.
NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
A finding can be overturned by the next paper. A promise can only be broken by the people who made it.
A technology arrives. Who pays?
The Industrial Revolution books drop one new thing into the city at a time, the newspaper, the post, paper money, the railway, and then stay in the room for the bill.
The question is never “does it work?” It works. That is what makes the question interesting.
The interface, not the ambition
Pratchett announced in 2007 that he had posterior cortical atrophy, and called it an embuggerance, his own word, which is neither a battle nor a journey. He went on writing by dictating, and with speech recognition software, until he died in 2015.
Dictation is not a lesser way of writing a book; it is a way of writing a book.
GNU
In Going Postal a name is sent up and down the clacks towers with three letters in front of it, so that it is never logged and never stops. Readers began doing the same thing on the web when he died, in a header nobody has to read. This street sends it too.
it is the exact structural joke, an unlogged message that costs one line of config and turns around at the end of the line.
this site now sends the header, and says
this street sends the header toohere.
Second Thoughts
A witch checks her own thinking where somebody can see her do it.
The ladder is not the problem. The ladder with the top rung painted on is the problem.
Which is why this street publishes its own corrections in its changelog, and why every quotation in this room says where it was read.
What is not in this city
- Nothing from a fan wiki. The books are the source for what this room says about them, and our pages and Star Stuff for every quotation. The fan wikis are fan-written descriptions of somebody else’s invented world, and nothing here is copied from one.
- No art of theirs. No cover, no map of the city, no crest, no lettering and no character is drawn. The city in the window is ours, made of crooked roofs anybody might draw, and nobody is in it.
- Nobody diagnosed. Not the people of the Disc and not their author, who named the one condition he had himself. We recognise; we do not label.
- Not the estate’s. Terry Pratchett’s estate has no involvement in this room, was not asked, and has not seen it. Every reading here is ours, and so is every mistake.
- Nothing counted. No ranking of the books, no best character, no favourite. A league table of the Watch would be exactly the thing the Watch is about not being.
- Nothing moves. The morning is caught halfway across the city and stays there, at every setting, MAX GLITTER included. On the Disc, light is slow; here it is patient.
Next door
- The Community Library, next door, a celebration of the public library, where the aisle at the back is a little longer on the inside than it is from the outside, and a ball of string runs into L-space.
- Oook, through L-space behind the library, the Disc itself seen from out in the dark, in the Librarian’s own colours.
- Covenstead, on the street, where First Sight and Second Thoughts are written up at length in a kitchen full of mismatched china.
- Learning Large, where our Competency Networks page’s practices are set out in a glasshouse at night.
The Turtle Moves
The room closes the way Star Stuff’s Easter Eggs collection closes, with its drawing of Great A’Tuin and the passage under it, copied whole.
Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves.
Small Gods is a book about an institution that kept every instrument of belief and mislaid the thing itself — a church with an enormous apparatus and a god reduced to a tortoise nobody can hear. The Turtle in it is not a doctrine. It is the thing that goes on being the case whether or not anyone believes it, and the heresy that gets people tortured is the flat refusal to stop saying so.
Asked whether it is really true, Didactylos does not argue. He says the Turtle exists, that this will go on happening either way, and then the three words the whole book has been walking toward: “It is real.” That is why the passage sits at the foot of this collection rather than anywhere else. The eggs are the pages about our own furniture — our numbering, our mistakes, where our method came from — and this is the sentence underneath all of it. No. 49 spends eleven spreads conceding that the universe contains no atom of justice and that our masthead is a promise rather than a finding. The Turtle is the other half of that, and the half we never get to choose: some things are simply so, and go on being so through every empire that would rather they weren't.
One correction the drawing owes, because this is the kind of page that owes them. A turtle carrying elephants carrying the world is not Hindu cosmology, though it is endlessly repeated as such. The stack appears in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) as a story about “an Indian,” and Bertrand Russell repeats it in 1927; scholarship on the epics and major Puranas finds no world-upholding elephant in them at all, and Kurma is a pivot for churning rather than a world-bearer — which No. 35 already says. So what Pratchett is riffing on is a European joke about India, not anyone's scripture. This drawing is therefore a novelist's invention drawn as a novelist's invention, and it is deliberately not filed beside the five turtles people made. They are not the same turtle, and that is the connection.
Whose this is
- The Discworld is Terry Pratchett’s, and every line of his here is credited to the book it is from: one read by Ryan in his own copy of Raising Steam, and the rest already quoted on one of our pages or on Star Stuff before this room was built. His estate has no involvement in this room, was not asked, and has not seen it. Discworld is a trade mark, and nothing here is offered as anything of theirs.
- The city is ours, crooked roofs anybody might draw, a thin tower, a clacks tower and a bridge, made as code by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to Ryan’s brief. It is not a map of anywhere, nobody is in it, and nothing on this page calls an AI while you read it.
- Six drawings and some of the words are Star Stuff’s, from No. 49, One Atom of Justice, A Promise, Not a Finding and the Easter Eggs collection, whose closing section The Turtle Moves is copied whole, by Stimpunks and Helen Edgar’s More Realms, under CC BY-SA 4.0 like this street. The drawings are as Star Stuff has them, in this room’s colours, with one line changed and said so.
- Every other quotation belongs to whoever said it and is credited where it stands: Karl Spracklen and Ian Lamond, Sonny Jane Wise, Hari Srinivasan, Kristen Gillespie-Lynch and colleagues, @MxOolong and Lori Hogenkamp. The words around them are ours, written for this room, and so is every reading of the books; nothing about the Disc was taken from a fan wiki.
- Two lines are from Karl Spracklen and Ian Lamond’s paper in Leisure Sciences, 2025, open access under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, quoted as they are and not adapted.
- Every quotation in this room is 40 words or fewer. Every one but the first was read on 2026-11-02 on the page it names, and
tools/make-widdershins.pychecks each word for word against our copy of stimpunks.org, Star Stuff’s own repository and the paper, whenever they are on the machine. The first, from Raising Steam, was read in the book by Ryan, from his own copy, and says so under it; nothing here can read it again. - The type is Grenze, by Omnibus-Type, a face between a roman and a blackletter, for the room’s name and headings, under the SIL Open Font License, and Proza Libre, by Jasper de Waard, for everything you read, under the SIL Open Font License, both read off their own records. Star Stuff’s drawings keep their own Space Mono. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a cobblestone come loose from the street, lying on the floor
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: Which way is against the turn?
Before the code: On the Disc there are four directions: hubward, rimward, turnwise and one more. Which one goes against the way the world turns?
Hint 1
It is the name over the door.
Hint 2
It is the arm of the compass that points into the morning.
Last hint
Widdershins.
Give me the answer
The answer is Widdershins. Hubward is to the middle, rimward to the edge, turnwise the way the Disc turns, and widdershins against it. The English word comes from the Middle Low German for against the way.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: COBBLE
That is the one.
Hubward is to the middle, rimward to the edge, turnwise the way the Disc turns, and widdershins against it. The English word comes from the Middle Low German for against the way.
Quest code: COBBLE
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and in this city nothing moves at any setting, MAX GLITTER included, because on the Disc the light is slow and here it is patient.