Terry Pratchett's Study
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sussi.dk
"But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it."
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
> "I bought 10 Kangoo vans"
> "I used to drink one bottle of [awful] wine a day, now I drink 10"
> "He bought 1500 pairs of the [horrible] shoes he wears everyday"
> "I used to spend a month a year camping, now I can spend 10 months a year camping"
Okay but most of those are contemptible and that one sounds like a marked change in one’s commitment to enjoying life.
Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development.
It's a god damn mess. Shit is piled everywhere. You can see some works in progress. Apparently he bought a lot of art books of other artists. It was a big process to move it: "she assembled a team of conservators, curators, and archaeologists to carry out the move. The archaeologists made survey and elevation drawings of the small studio, mapping out the spaces and locations of all the objects, while the conservators prepared the works for travel and curators tagged and packed each of the items, including the dust. The walls, doors floor and ceiling were also removed."
To my eye the grain on the desk also looks far too large compared to the way it would look with such a grain on a regular sized desk photgraphed from the implied distance.
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN 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. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY. Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4)
Taken from: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/583655-hogfather
Guards, Guards (from 1987) is crammed with them:
> They avoided one another's faces, for fear of what they might see mirrored there. Each man thought: one of the others is bound to say something soon, some protest, and then I'll murmur agreement, not actually say anything, I'm not stupid as that, but definitely murmur very firmly, so that the others will be in no doubt that I thoroughly disapprove, because at a time like this it behooves all decent men to nearly stand up and be almost heard...
> No one said anything. The cowards, thought each man.
So much insight about the human condition in those books.
In his Usenet days he was also active on the newsgroups about the game Thief, he played that a lot.