Terry Pratchett's Study

Posted by ColinWright 12 hours ago

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Comment by simonw 9 hours ago

Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...

"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.)

Comment by jebarker 7 hours ago

I like this mindset and have tried to adopt it as I’ve made some money. What has proven more insidious than being tempted to buy yachts though is just the daily creep of spending slightly more on everyday things or when you travel.

Comment by cite_please 5 hours ago

Traveling is a strange phenomenon that has mutated into a narcissistic behavior. Not sure where it comes from.

Comment by numbsafari 4 hours ago

Care to explain more?

Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development.

Comment by lanfeust6 3 hours ago

Sedentary isn't the word you're looking for.

Comment by pjscott 2 hours ago

One of the dictionary definitions of “sedentary” refers to living in the same spot and not traveling, usually used in anthropology to talk about non-nomadic populations.

Comment by localhost8000 3 hours ago

what word would you suggest?

Comment by paulryanrogers 3 hours ago

Homebodies, grounded, rooted?

Comment by lanfeust6 2 hours ago

settled, static, parochial

Comment by jebarker 4 hours ago

Traveling is something I live for. It’s been a great joy in my life to see and experience the variety of nature and culture around the world. You can certainly warp it into an extravagant experience though. I’m struggling to see where narcissism comes in though - maybe travel with the intent of showing off on social media?

Comment by roenxi 2 hours ago

Interestingly; that goes to whether someone is a hedonist or not. Dumping money into personal pleasures would defeat the point of the wealth for many. The idea of bettering themselves is expressed through boosting social status rather than hedonistic pleasure. If you gave the average man on the street more money they'd buy yachts and whatnot because they know that people have yachts generally have a higher social status than people who do not. They don't have a strong concept of wealth independent of status.

Comment by wcunning 8 hours ago

I bought a house, lived there for a couple years and then bought a better tractor (Kubota L45) than we had on the farm growing up. Now I can get 10 truckloads of woodchips from ChipDrop and mulch a whole acre of my yard in an afternoon.

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Comment by vntok 9 hours ago

This documentary of a French nouveau-millionaire perfectly showcases this mindset: https://youtu.be/jK4wnCLuBtI?is=2Q2QYQyfoCnaObhv (AI powered English subtitles available)

> "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"

Comment by prmoustache 7 hours ago

Note: this is not a real documentary but a satirical one.

Comment by boothby 7 hours ago

> "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.

Comment by comrade1234 8 hours ago

You can see Francis bacon's studio in Dublin. They moved it from London to a museum in Dublin. I don't think he would have liked that - he was born in Dublin but I think he lived his life in London and maybe didn't care for Dublin that much.

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."

https://hughlane.ie/arts_artists/francis-bacons-studio/

Comment by fendiao 53 minutes ago

Thanks for sharing this. On a related note the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh has recreated sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi's studio, it's incredible to see: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/paolozzi-studio

Comment by timnetworks 11 hours ago

Kinda surprised the website doesn't have clacks[1] overhead.

1. http://www.gnuterrypratchett.com

Comment by qznc 6 hours ago

She made it as a present for her son. Maybe only he is the big Terry Pratchett fan? On the other hand, this is made with so much love to detail, she obviously knows a lot about Pratchett.

Comment by valorzard 8 hours ago

All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

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

Comment by simonw 5 hours ago

It's wild how you can read basically any Discworld book and find gems like that one. I read them as a teenager and loved them, going back to them decades later I find that there was so much wisdom in there that my teenage brain hadn't even begun to appreciate.

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.

Comment by hattar 2 hours ago

I have to weigh in with my favorite quote, also from Guards! Guards!

> ...you think there are the good people and the bad people,” said the man. “You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.”

> He waved his thin hand and walked over to the window. “A great rolling sea of evil,” he said, almost proprietorially. “Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!” He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

> “Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,” he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, “but you fellows really need us [bad people]....we’re the only ones who know how to make things work."

> "You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”

Comment by arjie 6 hours ago

You're kidding. That's a miniature setting? I know that a photo can elide details that give us scale but I would never have noticed. I thought the coat hanger was a bit oddly gaudy and blobby for a full size but if it were miniature that makes sense. Hard to get that detail. Nicely done! Also, the website itself is pretty neat and old school. I'm quite the fan.

Comment by goodmythical 4 hours ago

You can see the shadow that the frame is casting in to the miniature, if that helps you see it.

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.

Comment by 3eb7988a1663 6 hours ago

That narrow desk makes me uneasy. Seems like a mini ordeal where you have to perfectly line up the chair to insert and extricate yourself.

Comment by emil-lp 8 hours ago

TIL he was an avid gamer!

Comment by Scarblac 6 hours ago

This is a great story about the Oblivion mod he worked on: https://www.eurogamer.net/the-story-behind-the-oblivion-mod-...

In his Usenet days he was also active on the newsgroups about the game Thief, he played that a lot.

Comment by entuno 6 hours ago

You can see the gaming influence in several of the books. In particular, a big part of Snuff was inspired by the goblin caves in Oblivion (IIRC had had a mod created that made the goblins peaceful, and he also contributed to the Vilja companion mod), and you can see his love of the Thief games in various parts of Night Watch and Making Money.

Comment by pixelesque 7 hours ago

His daughter is (or at least was) a game designer.

Comment by paulpauper 7 hours ago

This is so fascinating. had no idea he had a 6-screen set up, was a doom fan, and the Alzheimer's page hits hard, as he died of that

Comment by a2tech 6 hours ago

Pretty sure that was the point.

Comment by Scarblac 6 hours ago

His reason for having 6 screens was "I don't have room for 8".