Hahahahaha, nope.
Probably not doing a long (by my standards, not yours) read if I can help it.
Didn’t keep track of first and last card of the year (and I’ve got 8 days on last card), am genuinely unsure of what the coolest thing I’ve gotten in any or all of my hobbies is without researching my own life (memory issues will do that), and I’ve only got three goals for 2024. One of them is “have fun”, another is “get rid of a bunch of stuff, because I can totally spare it”, and the rest is below.
Short (again, by my standards) Version:
I still have hobbies. I probably still need some new ones, but let’s deal with the ones that are currently on my plate first.
I’m looking to wrap up the serious collecting part of my current hobbies by June of 2024. After just under 5 decades of Collecting Them All (thanks, Oats), I’m really tired of being constrained by completism, so I’m working on that, to the best of my ability.
I’m not getting rid of all of my stuff, but just going over my doubles, I have kind of a lot. More posts about that here soon, I promise.
I have started doing card trades again, and I think people have been pretty happy with their ends of the deals so far. Have a few of you to square away stuff with yet, and a few that I’m still trying to get things moving with, but I’ve been in touch with all of you, or tried to be, anyway, pretty recently.
I’m almost out of active players whose sports cards I collect. Weird. Right now, I’m down to Vlad Jr., Harper and Greinke, assuming he finds a gig for ’24. (If I’m a baseball team, I sign the guy and let him pitch, no matter how he pitches, for as long as he wants to. His value’s much bigger than wins and losses.)
Probably for the best that I’m not focusing on the present day in sports, as a company I don’t care for has a near-monopoly on sports cards.
As I wrote on a Discord server that’s familiar to a few of my readers earlier today:
“OK, so who wants to help me further figure out what cards I wish to keep collecting?
I’ve been updating my comic and video game want lists throughout the weekend, had a few of my top wants come in, so I keep updating those on my site, and every time, when I look at the top card wants? It’s all kind of a blur of names and numbers to me. Which happens, we fall in and out of hobbies, and sometimes, if stuff’s not right in front of you and you’re not in the middle of it, you’re not really in touch with what’s fun about it.
But yeah, I streamlined the want list some, but I need to further figure out what I’m actually excited to chase at this point, if anything. It could be that nothing changes further on that list, but I just don’t prioritize it aside from trading my duplicate and unwanted cards with y’all.
Tall order, I know. I don’t think it’ll lead to any bigger of a sell-off than I’ve already been passively working toward (like, I’m not going to start shoveling ’59 Topps at people or whatever), but I really need to continue to nail down my perspective on that one of my collections.
(It’s not the only one. I have tons of action figures, but only really have Mego and DC Direct/Marvel Legends-scale figures on display right now.)”
In my other hobbies, I’m pretty close to having the collections I dreamed of as a kid, and hopefully I get some genuine quality time to enjoy them as an adult. I also definitely have to figure out what that looks like for a few of ’em, but “that’s why we play the games”, so to speak.
But heck, enough about me, though. How was your year?