Thursday, November 25, 2021

The thruppeny ha'penny estate

 between the third estate (the commoners) and their kids is inheritance. One thing I've seen in recent years  is the amount of stuff accumulated in a person's life that is of precious little use to their descendants. Piles and piles of paperwork - receipts for stuff long since binned - and lots of old appliances or even content (VHS videos, CD recordings etc etc). But more distressing is books. Some people have entire collections or libraries of wonderful  works. The task of sorting through these is daunting. Not just because they don't have much monetary worth, but because they represent experience and knowledge that one's parents may have acquired over years, and one had not appreciated. Indeed, looking through such libraries, one realises that they have probably been curated (lousy genre stuff binned, just the tasty SF and 'Tec works, but also factual stuff that might give one a mind map of where the ma or da's headspace was at, man. But it would take too long. And when one inherits this mathom.  one is also already half way through one's own life time of reading.

Is there a way to make life easier for one's (usually grown up) kids by pre-sorting the library and adding an FAQ and maybe notes (readme, read this first, don't read this til you have witnessed death, this book will not change your life/wife/knife, but it will make me laugh...etc)

How would one know if the experiment had worked?

No comments: