Picture of the sword and source here: http://www.geekosystem.com/terry-pratchett-sword/


Just how cool is legendary fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett? In early 2009, he was knighted, reportedly saying on the occasion that “you can’t ask a fantasy writer not to want a knighthood. You know, for two pins I’d get myself a horse and a sword.” This year, he took his new station of Knight Bachelor seriously: Pratchett took it upon himself to forge a sword using more than 175 pounds of iron ore found in a deposit near his home in Wiltshire. For good measure, he added several chunks of meteorite — “thunderbolt iron” for their “highly magical” properties: “you’ve got to chuck that stuff in whether you believe in it or not.”

news.com.au: wrote:

With help from his friend Jake Keen — an expert on ancient metal-making techniques — the author dug up 81kg of ore and smelted it in the grounds of his house, using a makeshift kiln built from clay and hay and fuelled with damp sheep manure. … After days of hammering the metal into bars, he took it to a blacksmith, whom he helped to shape it into a blade, which was finished with silverwork.

Pratchett: “Most of my life I’ve been producing stuff which is intangible and so it’s amazing the achievement you feel when you have made something which is really real.”

This was the most recent thread on Pratchett so here goes:

From blastr.com

Pratchett, who has campaigned in his native United Kingdom for the right of assisted suicide, has begun the formal process of assisted suicide in Switzerland, one of the few countries in the world to legalize euthanasia. Specifically, this would take place at Dignitas, a clinic that provides qualified doctors and nurses to assist with the patients' suicides.

Dignitas has sent Pratchett the paperwork he needs to sign to begin the assisted suicide process—but he has yet to sign it.

According to The Guardian,

wrote:

"The only thing stopping me [signing them] is that I have made this film and I have a bloody book to finish," he said during a question-and-answer session following a screening at the Sheffield documentary festival Doc/Fest. He said that he decided to start the process after making the film Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die, which shows the moment of death of a motor neurone sufferer, millionaire hotel owner Peter Smedley.

Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die aired Monday in the United Kingdom, which means the end could be nigh for our literary hero. But the The Guardian wrote that "According to Dignitas, 70% of people who sign the forms do not go through with taking their own lives."

Hacker wrote:

You know, it's one of my personal goals in life to get knighted. I'm descendant from a german king on my dad's mothers side, and a descendent of an english knight on my dads dad side.

While you could be knighted, Americans can't have titles of nobility; or at least they're not acknowledged here.

I just heard that Miyamoto was to be knighted in France.