It’s been nearly a decade since this site launched, and my intro post both is and isn’t an accurate description of what this site is (and isn’t). This post is a little better and clearer (I have a few adjustments to make to the policies here), but good luck finding it in my archives if I don’t point it out like I just did, so in the interest of letting people, both old and new, where I’m at…
Hi! I’m Scott. I run this website that’s very 20th century in that it’s mostly, but not entirely about my collecting hobbies. That’s a weird place to be in 2025, but it’s my life. What else do you really want to know about me, truthfully?
What I usually do here: I procrastinate about posting.
What I’d like to be doing here: I’d like to post a little bit about all of my hobbies, and while they’re hobbies and it’s not mandatory or anything, I’d like to make them make sense within the context of my life in the present day. I’d also like to occasionally list some of my belongings for sale or trade here, but I’ve got some work to do on that (see below).
My approach to this, I’ve come to understand, is bass-ackwards. I’m writing dry, overly long stuff about relatively esoteric subjects, in an age when people either want short videos or long podcasts. What I’m starting to do again somewhat publicly gives me joy and helps me to make sense of and remember my life, at a time in my life when it’s harder to do both than it used to be. It’s its own form of therapy for me. If you’re along for the ride on that, fantastic. If not, I’m sure I’ll be doing it anyway.
A thing I should also mention again about my collecting hobbies: I’ve been looking to wind them down, and have, for the most part, since my 50th birthday a little over a year ago. Will this impact my ability to run a website that’s largely about collecting hobbies? I doubt it. I may have something of a backlog of things to talk about.
What I’m doing toward my goals here: right now, I’m starting a few different projects, and will be fleshing out some others in the near future, ideally.
First up is Personal Comics Chronology, a project inspired and heavily fueled by the legendary generosity of information sharing that is Mike’s Amazing World of Comics (rest easy, Mike). In it, I’m reading all of my comic books in chronological order, by release date, taking notes about what the books make me think and feel, and also contextualizing them by talking about what happened in the world on the day that they were released. I am in the early stages of this project, but the posts have begun.
Next up is The Player Collection Project. (No fancy category link for it yet.) I’m gonna write more about this than I did the comics project, because there’s already an explainer page for the comics project, and at least one example of what I’m doing is up already (the second installment is about half done). After four and a half decades of primarily being a trading card set collector (which tends to land the cards you collect in a box or binder that rarely, if ever gets looked at, in my world), I am working toward organizing collections for all of the players I like (and being honest with myself about who they are and how many there are), using non-set collection cards I already had aside, and also pulling one duplicate copy of each card of a player I collect from my duplicate card boxes (which are mostly used for trades these days).
I got started on this tangent when I was going through the handful of player collection binders I’ve started to assemble, and realized that they felt incomplete without things like base Topps cards in them. It got started from there, and as these things frequently do, it spiraled into becoming a lot of work. I’m enjoying seeing this start to take shape, but it’s very time consuming and genuinely physically demanding to go through this many cards.
So far, the only evidence of this process that you’ll see, unless you happen to be on a card collector Discord I frequent, is I’ve given Trading Card Player Collections its own section in my not-at-all-mobile-friendly sidebar, consolidated the various types of player collections I have in progress to make them (ideally) less confusing (there are now just two: one for people who play or played baseball, even if they played other sports, and another for the people whose cards I collect who played other sports), and added or re-added a LOT of players to the lists. I’m not quite ready to do any trades for cards of any of these people, as I’m still sorting through my trade boxes, but I will be, eventually.
As for how it will present itself in the future here: I may feature players, show off cards I’m rediscovering, and talk in greater detail about what I love about the cards or the players. Or it could take some other form. Who the hell knows? I’ll figure it out. The Plan is still very much a work in progress.
Another fun to consider goal here is to be able to passively fill card binders with these player collections, for the rest of my life, whenever the mood strikes me. If I never finish, that’s OK. If I do, that’s OK, too. If things continue to trend the way that they have in my lifetime, I probably won’t add a lot of new player collections, even if I continue to follow the sports/other occupations of new people that I could theoretically come to collect cards of, because I ran the numbers, and new additions started trending downward sharply after 1991, with the only upticks being in 1997, 2001, 2007 and 2019. So getting caught up, eventually, is theoretically possible.
The thing that this process has made me hyper-aware of is that my ideal of what the personality of trading cards is supposed to be is framed around 1980 and 1981 Topps cards and especially the 1981 Topps Baseball Stickers set, which makes sense, because these were the years that I discovered baseball, bought my first baseball cards, completed my first set (the 1981 stickers), and saw my first baseball games, including my first in-person baseball game, but it also solidified my somewhat subconscious feelings about liking some specific teams that weren’t my then-favorite Yankees, including the Tigers, Royals, Orioles, but especially the Brewers.
The Brewers are also on my mind lately because of Just a Bit Outside: The Story of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers (excellent, recommended documentary; it’s streaming for free on The Roku Channel), and because I talk to a few Brewers fans these days who are enjoying their current success (I dunno if I’m ready to fully embrace another baseball team as a fan, though), but back in the early 1980s, they struck a little kid in New Jersey as being really cool motherfuckers. So, I’ve added or re-added a bunch of them to my player collection list.
Other reasons I added players: they have great names, they look awesome in their photos, they have inspiring, hilarious, or occasionally sad stories that resonate with me in some way; they jammed with Rush in their spare time and had a band with David Rosenthal from Rainbow (fun fact: David once gave me, through an employee of his, his old Casio FZ-10M sampler and his sample disks, but to date, I haven’t been able to get it working, and repairs on synths/samplers are expensive; I also broke a toe by running into this sampler once, when I had it on the floor…heavy bastard…); they’re still playing in independent or non-U.S. baseball leagues well past the point where most people considered their careers to be over, presumably for the love of the game; they were in a Larry Cohen movie, acting, not just playing themselves; or, of course, that they were or are just very good at their jobs.
Anyway, that’s cards.
Other Stuff:
I’m likely to reduce the internal restrictions on reviewing movies, music, books and so forth a bit, to where I can talk about the experience of enjoying the physical media that I’ve acquired over the years. Seems only fair.
I may also talk a little more about playing video games competitively, since I’ve been doing a lot of that of late, relative to what I’ve done in the past. Don’t panic, this isn’t going to turn into some Twin Galaxies-obsessed joint, nor am I likely to become someone who streams games on Twitch (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not really my world, though I do use Twitch) or anywhere else, and takes the Esports scene seriously. I’ve just been playing Street Fighter V competively (if poorly) lately (it’s teaching me a lot about how to achieve success at a goal through wildly unpredictable behavior, even if they’re still relatively difficult lessons within the context of the game itself), and I’ve been playing MobilityWare online multiplayer solitaire for about 14 years (last time I looked, I was ranked #359 worldwide on iOS Game Center, out of about 668,000 players, with close to a .750 winning percentage after around 22,000 lifetime games). I’m not an excessively competitive person in my old age, but these seem like decent outlets for what’s left of my competitive nature.
I haven’t been doing much with toys of late, in part because there’s a great deal of fascism-generated uncertainty in the toy industry right now. I’ve also got some space restrictions that I’ve run up against, and a lot of things to think about with regards to what to display, what to keep, and what to sell. Not to worry, toy weirdos: I will be posting about toys here and there, but for the time being, at least, it’ll probably be about toys I already have.
Stuff you probably shouldn’t expect to see here for the time being:
Travel stories, unless they’re past tense ones: my household is still isolating whenever possible, in the interest of COVID caution, after about 5 and a half years, so no trips to conventions, sporting events, or even record stores are on the horizon anytime soon.
Second Life stuff: I’m barely there, even now that there’s finally a somewhat-functioning mobile app, unfortunately. I’ve sort of lost touch with and track of the community, and it’s an uphill battle to get motivated to find new fun people there, particularly since the company who runs it (in all of its incarnations) have done their level best for decades to dissuade smart, funny, creative users from being there. I still have account(s), and I also still have Heck, but I’m not there often at all, and there are no events planned in the near future. If you want this to change, please give me a reason to change it.
I think that covers things for the moment.
Any questions?