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A lot of Stuff.

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19:55 / 09.05.06

My first comic has been gone for at least a decade and a half. I have some precious treasures that I will never part with in my collection, but I also have a lot of filler that I'll never read again, or half-filled runs that I could get rid of in favor of some nicely-bound trades.

Honestly, sleaze, if you don't get ahold of your addiction we'll have to stage an intervention. You don't want to end up like the Collyer Brothers, do you?

21:44 / 09.05.06

In the digital world, I'm probably an even more severe hoarder than in the physical. I've got all kinds of dreck going back to about 1988 or so... letters, captured text from BBS posts, massively downsampled pornography from the days of 4800 baud modems tucked away somewhere in a pile of floppies. When I look back at all of that stuff, there's one recurring theme:

Boy, am I glad my parents had no idea what I was doing with the computer they gave me.

15:51 / 10.05.06

I have a lot of stuff. I have assorted things like camping stoves and gaz canisters and table cloths and photographs that I find exhausting to deal with. (And astounding. I own these things because I dislike waste and have been offered them by people clearing out their attics. And they might just come in useful.)

Incidentally, I notice that I haven't listed books as 'stuff' - I think I must have created a separate, completely bogus mental sub-category just to allow me to pursue book-ownership obsessively. I find book purchasing totally justifiable no matter how my finances look or whether I have space, and I'm far less likely to let books go. They are my favourite kind of stuff.

16:58 / 10.05.06

I have very little stuff. But a big library...

I was thinking about this yesterday, I'd sacrifice everything else I own if I could save the books and maybe the vinyl collection I inherited from my parents. But the books first*. They don't count as Stuff do they? Stuff just takes up space, books make you a better person the picosecond you buy them.

*for the purpose of this thread Tarot decks count as books

Ex

17:03 / 10.05.06

Oh, completely, Quantum. Just inhaling the air that's been quite close to a book gets you closer to beatification.
Also, photopies of things that have been in books give off a healing glow. One can absorb this easily in one's sleep; it isn't dependent on one actually getting around to reading them.

I don't have too many books, but I do have too few bookcases. I have this ramshackle approximation of a bookcase and the top layer falls off every now and then. I put the lightest books on that shelf so as not to brain the residents.

I battle with the vanity of owning lots of books. I think all the ones I have at the moment are professionally useful or much loved, and not just to fill up the space and look All Clever. But the vanity comes and goes and has to be kept in check with culls and purges.

17:30 / 10.05.06

Vanity? I find I start hiding books around the house like booze.

'What do you mean there's two carrier bags of fantasy trilogies under the bed? No, I have no idea where they came from, the entire works of Stephen Donaldson you say? No, don't bother yourself giving them to the charity shop, I've never read them and they're probably worth a look.'

Biblioguilt or literati shame? Hard to tell, but certainly not vanity. I am *proud* of my books though, like a doting grandfather, I relish the occasional book challenge. Someone asked me for a good though provoking book the other day and it took me under twenty seconds to present them with a copy of The Glass Bead Game (Hesse), since they'd recently read Siddartha and had never heard of it. Go Quantum's library! They were pleased as you can imagine.

I was going to get a decent dictionary (i.e. etymological 2-volume OED or something) but we're getting broadband at home instead so I don't think I'll bother, although I do pine for the root of fjords at my fingertips. *sigh*

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