…let’s first see where we left off, and then, in Part II (I’m getting bold here, and making the assumption that I’ll write a Part II), we’ll see what there is to talk about now.
Some stuff left hanging in my last few posts:
Twitter: I still have my accounts there (basically in the interest in protecting usernames from getting taken by squatters and becoming Nazi spam), and I do read y’all when I can, but I have not been responding, nor have I been posting anything new of my own since I think 2 weeks after my last post here, when That Other Asshole took over. We’re still waiting to see where everyone ends up, which is tough when venture capital is trying to tear apart anything with mass appeal, and people don’t want to go to the smaller sites because “their friends aren’t all there”. (There’s also the small matter of a lot of the smaller sites being run by people who have no idea what they’re doing, but that’s another story.) The public or semi-public places where I can be easily found and reached are in the ‘tree.
Renovation stuff: bedroom done (pics coming soon), study is still a work in progress, but getting closer. I can reach all of my bubble gum cards and all of my comics at the same time now, so that’s a huge step up there, but now I have to figure out where everything I had to move out of the way to make that possible should go.
Cards I’ve gotten this year, and set-building: I’ve stuck to my guns on no Fanatics-designed Topps sets so far. I actually haven’t gotten a single 2023 Topps or Panini/Donruss card yet. Near as I can tell, The Last Card of 2022 was that Pro Debut Bo Jackson insert, and The First Card of 2023 was a photo finish, as I got a 1977 Kellogg’s Dock Ellis the same day as I got my ’22 Topps Update set, which should be the last new, complete set I end up with until 2029 Topps Heritage comes out. Otherwise, I’ve mostly been working on my Dock Ellis player collection, with 6 new additions in total this year, and I did finally pick off a ’72 Topps Steve Garvey, which is on its way to me.
In looking at current eBay and COMC prices, there are no bargains anymore, none at all, and with my health being what it is, I don’t have the resources I used to for finding things outside of my house, since I don’t browse anywhere anymore. That takes a LOT of the fun out of card collecting. I’m not saying that getting stuff on eBay, especially in spots when I run into a rare deal, isn’t fun, but everyone with any manufactured collectible of the post-WWII era has been treating their stashes like the second coming of Beanie Babies, because, frankly, people are desperate and hurting right now, so they’re looking to get top dollar for absolutely everything at all times. I’m also not saying that trading isn’t fun, and we’ll be circling back to that in a bit.
But…imagine for a second, for those of you who do, for whatever your reasons, feel safe casually leaving your homes these days, if you could no longer browse your local card shop, yard sales, flea markets, card shows, Target, etc. safely, and think about how much harder and more expensive it’d be to continue collecting trading cards. And yes, while on most days, trading cards are the least of my worries in this regard, that’s the position that the rest of you have forced a great many disabled and otherwise high-risk people into, by pretending that COVID is over because you’re bored with the plague and want to go to Applebee’s and lick each other’s faces. It’s not over, no matter what commercial realtors have made the President of the United States tell you, or what bullshit the eugenicists at the CDC are trying to feed y’all. Keep masking up, keep getting vaccinated, please give the non-essential travel and recreation a rest for a good while (and have an honest idea of what “non-essential” entails), and please be more considerate of your fellow human beings. Oh, and before you try, when I hear people tell me “you can’t keep people in their houses forever”, do you know what I hear them saying? I hear them saying that they no longer think of disabled people and people at higher risk of death from COVID as people.
(Hey, you asked me to start posting again!)
So, assuming I haven’t driven off what I generally find to be a relatively conservative audience from my following in one hobby by begging for my life (and, seriously, if reading any of this makes you angry, please re-assess your priorities in life), yes, I’m going to be looking into trading soon, because it’s the only real chance I have of finishing the sets I’m trying to, and because I need to make space in my house for other things. I have tens of thousands of cards in my “doubles pile”, and will be adding more even without having finds, as I’m starting to come to the conclusion that I’m less interested in finishing some sets, and have less of a chance of finishing them, than I did when I started building them. There are also players I used to collect that I don’t collect anymore, so there’s some big stashes of that kinda stuff. I updated my priorities a bit in the sidebar, and my big card want list (which did recently shrink by 10 pages, because I took a bunch of sets off that I hadn’t gotten a new card from in over 5 years) is current. Feel free to reach out, especially if we haven’t talked in a while. I may or may not be on a certain Discord which may or may not exist, or at least whose existence may or may not be public knowledge, so feel free to reach out there if you know what I’m talking about, as well.
I also have a few trades in progress that I need to circle back to before I start making new ones, but I just managed to finish getting the card boxes where I need them to be on Monday, for some perspective on how all of that has been going. I will get ahold of you ASAP, for reals.
Onto toys, I still owe y’all some pictures, which in this case, may break your brains, but I got a few more Mego-scale figures this week (Alice Cooper, Nathan Grantham from Creepshow and Reverse-Flash, all by Mego), and I have a few more coming (Tura Satana, no, really, Tura Satana, along with Deadman and the Super Friends version of Hawkman from Figures Toy Company).
Comics would definitely break your brain. Let’s skip comics for now. We’ll get back to ’em, though.
Video games, I’ve mostly been playing Stardew Valley, though I got Space Invaders Forever earlier this week, and that’s a lot of fun. I haven’t been playing a lot of games that were actually developed for Playstation 5 on my Playstation 5, which is, from what I understand, a relatively common experience. Go figure!
Haven’t bought a ton of new music of late (The Hypnogogue by The Church being the most recent CD, I think, and this beauty being my most recent vinyl of any kind), but I’m listening to plenty, and keeping up with new albums, too).
Tons of TV and movies. Too many to get into here, too. I never finished posting the October movie list from 2022, so here’s all of it:
Completed:
October 1st: Return of the Living Dead (1985) plus Return of the Living Dead II (1988) (bonus)
October 2nd: Saloum (2022)
October 3rd: Frankenstein (1931) plus Orphan: First Kill (2022) (bonus)
October 5th: Mad God (2021)
October 7th: House/Hausu (1977) plus Werewolf by Night (2022) (bonus)
October 8th: The Craft (1996)
October 10th: Maximum Overdrive (1986) plus The World’s End (2013) (bonus)
October 11th: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) plus May (2003) (bonus)
October 12th: Häxan (1922)
October 14th: The Amityville Horror (1979)
October 15th: Hellraiser (2022) plus Army of Darkness (1992) (bonus)
October 16th: The Omen (1976) plus A Trip To The Moon (1902) and The Meg (2018) as bonuses.
October 17th: C.H.U.D. (1984)
October 20th: The Exorcist (1973)
October 22nd: Bingo Hell (2021)
October 23rd: Terror Train (1980) plus Prom Night (1980) and The Fog (1980) as bonuses.
October 24th: Carrie (1976)
October 25th: The Babadook (2014)
October 26th: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)
October 28th: Forbidden Planet (1956) plus The Hidden (1987) (bonus)
October 29th: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) plus The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), The Stepford Wives (1975), Zombi 2 (1979) and The Stuff (1985) as bonuses
October 30th: The Wicker Man (1973) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974) (bonus)
October 31st: Nosferatu (1922), plus Wendell and Wild (2022), Shadow of the Vampire (2000), the The Legend of Sleepy Hollow segment of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) as bonuses
In short, we killed it last year, absolutely killed it. It is my intention to purposely avoid trying to “beat” 2022 this year, because that makes it far less fun and way more like work, but we covered a ton of ground. Our consensus favorites, aside from the films discussed here, were probably Hellraiser, C.H.U.D., Bingo Hell, The Fog, The Hidden, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Stepford Wives, Zombi 2, The Stuff, The Wicker Man and Shadow of the Vampire.
Another thing I did sneak in, sorta related, was watching every one of George A. Romero’s Dead movies recently, either re-watches or first-time viewings. I’ve seen the first 2 films a billion times, but hadn’t seen Day of the Dead or Land of the Dead since either first came out, and I’d never seen Diary of the Dead or Survival of the Dead, which are both better movies than the reviews would suggest, even if they’re smaller-scale movies (which means George probably had fun making them).
Like I said, a ton of TV (though I’m stalled on a few of my “big” series watches like Dark Shadows, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Cheers) and movies, and I’ve finally got my TV set up the way I’d like it to be. I ditched Google TV as an OS (de-lousing my set as much as I possibly could on that front), and I’m using a 2022 Roku Ultra to run everything now. This set-up is only a week old, but it’s so much better. Google TV is an only-sorta-functional nightmare (keeping sound synced, in particular, is the worst) with a terrible user interface. If you like the picture or sound quality of a particular set, but find that it runs Google TV, please, get a Roku or something. Honestly, having a Roku that does 4K and has an Ethernet port now is the best television viewing experience in terms of comfort, familiarity and ease-of-use that I’ve had since before cable went digital. It feels like a television again, rather than a computer monitor with some half-functional apps. Highest recommendation.
I ran out of steam typing all of that, so I’m going to try to split this into 2 parts (talking about “the future” more in Part II). Stay tuned for that, and yes, eventually, I will post some pictures and scan some things. Maybe I’ll even add categories to one of these posts! (I’m probably way too tired to run this site the way I used to, though.)
Looking through other “recent” posts (gosh, that’s a laugh), I definitely left some other threads hanging, so over time, I want to try and figure all of that out, too.
In the meantime, I hope this post finds you well, and in a perfect world, there should be another post soon.
Looks like I’m reading these out of order. Based on your other post, seems like you might not be trading much anymore for much longer, but if you are and have the time and patience, TCDB might be a great resource for you. I know it has for me, even though it’s taken a year and a half to get all of my duplicates on there, it’s definitely worth it.
I will probably always be trading, but I’m going to be fairly limited in acquiring new card trade bait for the foreseeable future. With that said, as I’m adjusting downward on the number of sets I had designs on trying to finish in the future, as well as the number of players I’ve had stashes of that are big enough to call “collections” in some cases, I will be adding things to “the pile” relatively soon, and some of them may be of interest to you. I have a few deals-in-progress ahead of any new ones (Kerry, Gritz, Bru and Haymay in I think that order), and I’ve been stalled out on those forever, so they are my top priority, but once they’re cleared, I will give your most recent want list a gander.
As for TCDB, I talk to people who are doing what you did, and if you’ll pardon my French, there is just no fucking way I’m using their interface to list 70,000+ mostly lower-value cards individually, no matter how good the results have been for y’all. I’ve also never felt super confident in their privacy settings, or in leaving data up there that could be swallowed up by another company someday, especially given that one of the most likely companies to do it (Beckett’s parent company) is not one I’d ever want to have that data.
Where unloading cards is concerned (keeping in mind that I’ve got about 1000 duplicate comics at this point, too, along with everything else I have too much of in my house), I’m looking for people who haven’t built all the sets yet, like you and I mostly have, to help me fill gaps in my sets and my player collections (which will eventually be better organized), or, alternately, people who are somewhat local to me and interested in buying medium-to-large collections (and my doubles pile is probably bigger than a great many collections out there, really, even if it’s been kinda picked through at the moment by the long-timers), and can be respectful both about my household’s safety needs, and the fact that there’s a lot that I have no desire to sell that they’re never going to lay eyes or hands on (in the past, I’ve had buyers, note that I said buyers and not traders here, be super pushy about that sort of thing).