Time for one of these…

Most of the people who constituted my core readership when I gave people something to read probably know this already, but I am still alive, as of this moment.

Have been trying to figure out what to do with this site for…years, really.

Today, I read comic books, moved about 20,000 trading cards up to the room where the rest of them live (nothing new, I was just pulling commons for trades back in the spring and it took me 6 months to put them back), listened to Billy Squier albums for the 2nd day in a row (I’ve done both of his albums with Piper, and 6 of his 9 solo albums…nice…if you’re curious, they seem to have an “even-numbered solo albums are the best ones” thing going on…), and continued to watch people settle in on Blueski. Cooking dinner in a minute.

I updated some of the sidebar stuff (which most of you will see at the bottom, rather than on the side, because this layout is that dated), and the want lists should all be up to date.

What to do next, indeed.

What have the rest of you been up to?

My Year in Hobbies 2023

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?

New Version of the Card Want List

Dig this.

While working on a deal with Nick, we were talking briefly about how tough it was to assess what I prioritize and value by looking at my card want list, so I had a look at the most recent version of it, and while I saved that version (and it’s still probably linked to all over this site, but there’s a pointer link to the new list on the old one now), I ended up cutting off 27 pages of wants for the new version of the list (version 6.0), and it is now linked to in most of the important places like the menus here, as well.

I think it reads much better, with all of the sets by all of the companies in one place, and no more confusion about higher/lower priority sets. If you see it here, it’s higher priority. I may re-add stuff from the previous list over time as I review it a bit more, but for now, this’ll do.

And yes, I’m actually back to trading at the moment, with long-in-gestation packages out to Madding at Cards on Cards and Bru this week, and a few other things in the works. Uncle Doc, if you see this, please get ahold of me about a trade we were sorta thinking about doing a year or two ago, as we were communicating near-exclusively through Twitter DMs, and I don’t do that anymore.

If you’ve been actively looking through my want list recently, or haven’t looked in a while (particularly if trying to look at the old list made you completely tune out), please give this thing a look, and let me know what you think of the new version!

A Few More Updates

Comic inventory is complete (list of duplicates for trade or sale coming soon), and the card boxes are open (filling 2 want lists at the moment, will hopefully have stuff in the mail tomorrow).

I enjoyed looking through the cards the other night, as I haven’t in a good while, and it was satisfying to find cards that people needed in a way I hadn’t felt in a while (my existing stock was really picked over for a long time, but I’ve gotten some new things, released some others into trade stock and am trading with someone who hasn’t had a full pass through my boxes yet in one case). Once I catch up on the names I had down for trades, I’ll be talking a bit more about what I have here that needs new/good homes, and what I’d like for it.

I’ve also been tweaking the look and functionality of this site a bit, and will be doing so for a while. On one hand, this layout isn’t as mobile-friendly as I’d like it to be, but on the other, mobile web browsers are hot garbage, so it’s gonna be a process.

That’s all for now. Enjoy your holiday if you celebrate a holiday this weekend and we don’t talk sooner, or just enjoy your weekend if you’re not down with all that (for what it’s worth, my household has transitioned to celebrating Big Meal Thursday, a name I credit my spouse with).