Author: Scott

My Year in Hobbies 2019: October!

October 2019:

Professional wrestler Kris Statlander, a woman with white skin and brown hair, wearing powder blue wrestling gear with purple trim and "KS" written on her tank top, yells for the crowd at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.
Professional wrestler Kris Statlander, a woman with white skin and brown hair, wearing powder blue wrestling gear with purple trim and “KS” written on her tank top, yells for the crowd at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.

What’s up, Kris Statlander?

I started out the month at the Season 2 premiere of Beyond Wrestling‘s “Uncharted Territory” TV series, which airs on Internet Wrestling Television. Yes, I really was this close to the action, as everyone who wants to be is at Beyond events. (I could’ve actually been even closer, but I grabbed a second row seat instead of a first row seat so I didn’t end up with any flying human beings in my lap.)

Beyond is one of the best independent professional wrestling promotions in the world, and chances are, if you’ve watched WWE, AEW, New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Ring of Honor, Impact, MLW or any of the other somewhat major wrestling promotions over the past decade, you’ve seen a whole bunch of Beyond alumni. Their shows are available on the aforementioned IWTV streaming service, which is some of the most fun you can have watching television and only $10 a month. I don’t work for Beyond or IWTV, but with the future of every small business in jeopardy right now (along with, well, everything and everyone else), I have to represent for them, because a great chunk of my last year has been spent enjoying their offerings. Please consider signing up for IWTV, buying some merch from Beyond on their site, or hitting an event (if and when events happen again) if you’ve ever got the means.

Here are a few more pictures from the Beyond show I went to…

Professional wrestler Lance Archer, a shirtless man with white skin and a red "murderhawk" hairstyle, stands at the back end of a wrestling ring and prepares to attack fellow pro wrestler Josh Briggs, a man with white skin and brown hair in black wrestling trunks and various knee and shoulder braces, laying prone at the front of the wrestling ring, at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.
Professional wrestler Lance Archer, a shirtless man with white skin and a red “murderhawk” hairstyle, stands at the back end of a wrestling ring and prepares to attack fellow pro wrestler Josh Briggs, a man with white skin and brown hair in black wrestling trunks and various knee and shoulder braces, laying prone at the front of the wrestling ring, at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA.

Hey, remember Lance Archer from the New Japan show in September? He came to Beyond a few days later, too! This is him getting ready to maul Josh Briggs (and he did).

Professional wrestler Orange Cassidy, a man with white skin, red hair, and brown aviator sunglasses, wearing a light blue jean jacket and a white t-shirt, looks directly at the camera from a distance in front of a maroon curtain at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA, as a photographer to his right tries to get a picture of him.
Professional wrestler Orange Cassidy, a man with white skin, red hair, and brown aviator sunglasses, wearing a light blue jean jacket and a white t-shirt, looks directly at the camera from a distance in front of a maroon curtain at a Beyond Wrestling show in Worcester, MA, as a photographer to his right tries to get a picture of him.

Orange Cassidy totally caught me taking a picture of him when he walked through the curtain. He’s doing better after his encounter with The Boogeyman, though he’s had a few run-ins with PAC and the Lucha Bros recently that haven’t been great for him.

Assuming life is anywhere near normal for the foreseeable future, you can see Kris Statlander, Lance Archer and Orange Cassidy on All Elite Wrestling‘s shows these days. (See what I mean about everyone passing through Beyond?) They run Wednesday nights on TNT in the States, and on YouTube.

I visited Keene, New Hampshire for the first time in October, and can heartily recommend both Bull Moose (a small regional chain of entertainment media stores packed with things I like to spend money on) and The Toadstool Bookshop, if you’re in the area. Both are great places to browse, and both will probably need your business when things open back up. (Notice a new, recurring theme here?) Keene, in general, is like a lot of mid-sized New England towns with a Main Street, fun to walk around. Enjoyed my time there. Almost ready to forgive the place for the Pumpkin Festival Riot of 2014 and the town’s handling of it.

a plastic and rubber bendable action figure of a white skeleton lays on a scanner bed.
a plastic and rubber bendable action figure of a white skeleton lays on a scanner bed.

It took me a couple of years, but I finally got ahold of one of the Mego-scale skeletons that they sell at Target around Halloween. I’d get a picture of it with the usual group shot, but we’re running late here, so this is the skeleton on a scanner bed, which looks kinda weird and cool.

I got, and played a fair amount of Stardew Valley for Playstation 4, but I wanna start over, as I totally had no idea what I was doing before I kinda backed my character into a corner. If you like games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but also like them to be a little less…Nintendo…this is a great game for that.

On the last flea market trip of the year, I saw this beauty of a Soundesign stereo…

A beige 1980s-era Soundesign stereo system sits on a flea market table.
A beige 1980s-era Soundesign stereo system sits on a flea market table.

No, I didn’t buy it. From my past experience owning a Soundesign (my first stereo was one), albeit one that wasn’t quite as beige, I was afraid to even touch it (those cassette deck buttons will snap on you as soon as look at you).

I did buy this on that trip, though…

A copy of Lou Reed's "Transformer" album plays on a turntable, with the album cover (featuring a black and white picture of Lou Reed, wearing makeup, and holding a guitar while standing at a microphone) standing on top of the turntable cover.
A copy of Lou Reed’s “Transformer” album plays on a turntable, with the album cover (featuring a black and white picture of Lou Reed, wearing makeup, and holding a guitar while standing at a microphone) standing on top of the turntable cover.

Lou was a mess, but he was one of the greatest messes.

Television seasons binge-watched in October 2019 (2): The End Of The Fucking World Season 2 (enjoyable television based on Charles Forsman‘s comics; Chuck and TEOTFW show-runner Jonathan Entwistle have Chuck’s I Am Not OK With This on Netflix now, too…), Scott Kelly: A Year In Space (this was an amazing thing to watch, even if it was done like a pretty hardcore NASA propaganda film).

First-run movies watched in August 2019 (1): El Camino (fun little TV movie, but they need to give Huell Babineaux his own spin-off now).

My Year in Hobbies 2019: September Part IV

Meanwhile, in the Upside Down…

We  already covered that I somehow managed to do this, right?

OK.

How about this?

An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle. First Row: Sable Antelope, Argali, Badger, Grizzly Bear, Polar Bear. Second Row: Beisa, American Bison, Wild Boar, African Buffalo, Wild White Bull. Third Row: Bactrian Camel, Wild Cat, Chamois, Cheetah, Chimpanzee.  
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle. First Row: Fallow Deer, Red Deer, Wapiti, Eland, empty space. Second Row: empty space, Fennec, empty space, Grant’s Gazelle, Giraffe. Third Row: Gnu, Rocky Mountain Goat, Gorilla, Hippopotamus, Jackal.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle. First Row: Jaguar, Kangaroo, Lesser Kudu, Leopard, Lion. Second Row: Lynx, Markhor, empty space, empty space, empty space. Third Row: African Rhinoceros, Indian Rhinoceros, Sambar, Snow Leopard, Springbok.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle.
An album page full of 1927 John Player & Sons Wild Animals’ Heads tobacco cards, featuring paintings by Arthur Wardle. First Row: Tiger, Walrus, Wolf, Yak, Grevy’s Zebra. Second Row: empty spaces. Third Row: Empty Spaces.

Toward the end of the flea market season, at the regular table of a coin dealer that I don’t usually spend a lot of time at, I spotted a bin of non-sports tobacco cards, and, when I glanced a little closer, almost immediately spotted the Arthur Wardle artwork. (I’ve wanted to get some of his cards for the longest time.) After a bunch of digging, I ended up with a near-complete set in great shape for a pretty reasonable price. Every card you see here except the Polar Bear card (which is the first I’ve gotten around to grabbing from eBay and, if it isn’t obvious right now, is not in the excellent condition these other cards are) is from that one lot.

My want list for these:

20 African Elephant

21 Indian Elephant

23 Common Fox

38 Moose

39 Nilgai

40 Puma

Television seasons binge-watched in September 2019 (2): Fleabag Seasons 1 and 2 (I accidentally watched it all in one sitting. I found it to be relatably problematic, if that makes sense.)

I will get through the rest of 2019, y’all, though in the past few weeks, the year summary and the goals for 2020 have become very different things. Stay tuned.

A few quick things…

1. I hope you’re all well, and stay that way. If I haven’t heard from you in a while, or even if I have, drop a line in the comments or via email, when you can. I think it’s pretty important to keep in touch right now.

2. I will be finishing My Year In Hobbies 2019 relatively soon. I plan on not leaving the house for a while, if I can help it, so it shouldn’t be that hard to make time for.

3. I’d say that we’re still looking for teams for my fantasy baseball leagues, but there kinda might not be sports for a while, so feel free to apply, but who the hell knows?

4. I plan on killing some time at Heck if the sudden downtime allows for it, and have also been playing No Man’s Sky on PS4 again of late (email if you want to meet up).

5. If you’d like to get notified when this site updates, there’s an email subscription form in the top right hand corner (or, on mobile, wherever this blasted unresponsive WordPress theme puts it, until I redo the layout). It’s relatively low-traffic, and will keep you in the loop, if you’re not one of the 3 people who are subscribed to my RSS feed.

That’s it for now. If I think of more, I can always post again (and annoy the email subscribers).

 

Hey, look! I’m a sucker! I bought 2020 Topps cards!

tin of 2020 Topps Series One baseball cards, and hanger box of 2020 Topps Heritage baseball cards on a brown table
A green tin of 2020 Topps Series One baseball cards (featuring Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a man with brown skin and blonde dreadlocks, wearing a grey and blue Toronto Blue Jays uniform and holding a baseball bat), and a black hanger box of 2020 Topps Heritage baseball cards (featuring Cody Bellinger, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Manny Machado, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Mike Trout on the cover) sit on a brown table.

It took me weeks on either purchase, but I finally bought some 2020 cards.

By now, you’ve seen ’em all, and they’re really nothing to write home about visually, so I’m not gonna scan ’em. No, really. I can tell you that my Series One gets were much better than my Heritage ones. I got Vlad, Acuna, Paddack, a bunch of other rookies and stars, the Clemente 35th Anniversary card, Greinke and Josh Bell in my Turkey Reds, and 2 Vlad insert set cards in Series One. I got a Don Sutton Baseball Flashbacks insert in the Heritage box. No high numbers, no players I collect, not much in the way of interesting-to-me rookies or stars. The Heritage cards look a *little* better in person, but not that much. The photography’s almost painfully generic, which I’ve seen other people complaining about more than the font issues. I just don’t get how you can take a sure thing like ’71 Topps and screw it up. Biggest disappointment of a Heritage set since 2012 (and that one was just me not liking the base design/card stock), and I got a crappy box of it, to boot.

On the Series One front, if you’re looking for the following inserts, they’re available for trade:

Decade’s Next Kyle Tucker 14
Turkey Red Willson Contreras 19
Turkey Red Justin Verlander 38
Turkey Red Blake Snell 85
Turkey Red Chrome Jacob deGrom 65
Decades’ Best Tony Gwynn 56
Decades’ Best Chrome Phil Niekro 40 (How often has Phil Niekro been on a Chrome card of any kind?)

High priority will be given to anyone offering up these cards from the 2020 Topps 35th Anniversary insert set (not building the set, just want these singles): 8-9, 14, 19-23, 38, 48, 51, 53, 55-56, 61, 64-65, 70, 72-73, 77, 79, 83, 88, 96-98, 100

I probably won’t buy too much more, if any more, of either of these. If you’re looking to get some old cards for some new cards and have a bunch of doubles (or the 35th Anniversary stuff I’m looking for), get ahold of me, and we should be able to do some trades, at least on the Series One. I honestly shouldn’t trade doubles of cards I like for 2020 Heritage. It is REALLY disappointing stuff.

Before anyone asks, I’m keeping the Vlad Jr. tin, to put my weed in or something. (No, I don’t actually smoke weed. I’m an old square. It’d be a cool box to keep your weed in, though, if you do that. Not that I’m recommending that anyone do drugs. You have Hollywood to do that for you, or the TikTok, if you’re one of the youngsters.)

Also, and I don’t think I’m alone here this weekend, but I ran into the 2020 Series One tins in both stores I went to tonight, one of which was a Target, so I’m not sure if they’re as hard-to-get as people tried to make them out to be, initially, and they’re obviously not Walmart exclusives. I didn’t run into any Prizm basketball, though, so that’s probably really sold out everywhere.

Wanted: Owners For Dynasty Keeper Roto Yahoo Fantasy Baseball League, and Probably-Not-Keeper Roto Baseball Test League On Fantrax

A list of settings for a Yahoo Sports Fantasy Baseball league. A list of settings for a Yahoo Sports Fantasy Baseball league. If you need a full text description of the settings, please email scott@ineednewhobbies.com, and I'll be happy to send it to you.
A list of settings for a Yahoo Sports Fantasy Baseball league. If you need a full text description of the settings, please email scott@ineednewhobbies.com, and I’ll be happy to send it to you.

So, yeah, it’s that time of year again. We had a long-time owner bow out because he’s not watching much baseball or playing fantasy sports these days, and were kinda lookin’ for some more people to begin with, so we’re up for adding 1-3 expansion teams to this, and another thing we’re working on, which you’ll read about below.

A few details not listed in the above image:

1. We’re a dynasty keeper league. For the past 5 years, we’ve actually let people keep their entire rosters (it wasn’t a hard requirement, but people could keep up to 25 players), but this year, we’ve dialed that back to letting people keep up to 20 of their players.

2. We’re probably not going with Batters Grounded Into Double Plays as a pitching category this year, but it’s there right now because it’s been a category for about a decade, and because we haven’t decided on a new one yet.

3. After this season’s over, we may be moving this league to Fantrax, as they give leagues year-round access to their keeper leagues, and, even more importantly, the league message boards. I left Facebook recently, which means that right now, this league doesn’t have a true year-round community forum. I’ve been testing Fantrax for that, and it works pretty solidly, but it’s tough to get people to adopt, as some of us have been on Yahoo for over 2 decades. We’ll always be sentimental about Yahoo, and may stick around, but the feature set has gotten more and more limited and broken over the years, so we’re at least considering a permanent move at this time.

4. So, in addition to the Yahoo league this year (and you don’t have to be in both leagues; it’d be fine if we had some new, different owners in each), we’re going to draft a new, non-keeper (at least as of right now) league from scratch on Fantrax, too. We’ve got the same 9 owners over there, most of the same settings (Fantrax has Inherited Runners Stranded as an available pitching category, which we’re using instead of GIDP there) and we’re drafting the same night (March 21st), right after we each draft our 5 players on Yahoo.

As for the league’s history, this is our 19th season, largely with the same crew of owners (2 of us have played every season, and about half the league’s owners date back to the mid-2000s). We switch team names a fair deal during the season, but aside from that, we’re relatively stable and well-behaved in our old age.

If you’d like to join either league, feel free to comment, or drop me an email, and we’ll talk about it!