Mina Sanwald

Clever billboard advertising the BBCs Dracula. (This is why you hire artists.) Follow it to the end.

Pretty clever, right?

Basically as close to perfect as it's currently possible to get!

"Accuracy" is a bit of a misleading term when it comes to palaeoart, because the inherent uncertainty of reconstructing extinct species means the chances of ever creating a 100% accurate version are basically none.

Some other palaeoartists like Mark Witton and John Conway have supported using the term "credible" rather than "accurate" when talking about palaeoart, which is something I like! "Credible" means the artwork has produced one possible interpretation, sticking as closely to all the scientific evidence out there as possible but leaving room for uncertainty or error.

So the Prehistoric Planet Tyrannosaurus is almost guaranteed to not be 100% accurate to what the real animal looked like. But, given all the available scientific evidence, it is one of the most credible reconstructions out there!

An explanation via @blackboardmonitor-deactivated20:

In Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal, the operators of the clacks towers use “GNU” as a code to mean the message should be passed on to every tower. An article on wiki-Lspace says that “The G in the code means to send it on; the U at the end means to turn the message around at the end of the line; and the N means not logged.”

When a clacks operator died while working, or was killed, their name was passed in the overhead with “GNU” in front of it, as a way of commemorating them, of not letting them die, because, “a man is not dead while his name is still spoken”. It’s a way of keeping them alive, you see.

Terry Pratchett, may he rest in peace, wrote the clacks as a fantasy equivalent of social media, of emails, in particular, but general interweb communication as a whole. Therefore, people are posting “GNU TERRY PRATCHETT” because it’s the equivalent in our world of commemorating him on the clacks; we’re keeping him alive, in a way, in a way which I think he would have liked. 

Because no one is really dead until the ripples they caused die away. So, now & until I myself die: GNU Terry Pratchett.

(ETA: many web designers and others who code web pages—myself among them—have added the message to the “meta” sections at the top of web pages via the “X-Clacks-Overhead Header”, so that every time the page loads, the message is “heard” again…)

His helmet had this odd discolored patch on it. Like, white against white, but … weird? It’s then that I realized his helmet didn’t have a discolored patch, it had a patch missing. A big chunk of his helmet had just been shaved away, the curve of the helmet gone and sanded flat by whatever it had been scraped against. And running through that patch, from one side of the helmet to the other, was this big crack, like the whole helmet had split like an eggshell. 

Our teacher took a couple deep panting breaths and then told our class: “And this,” he took another deep breath, “is why you always wear your helmet”.