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What do you collect?
Collections can be made of anything. Some items have no purpose other than being part of the collection itself, something to look at and feel warm inside, while others are more functional or enjoyable by themselves.
Some collectors are moved by a desire for completion, some by nostalgia, or historical preservation. There are also those who accumulate objects which they believe will grow in value.
People collect books, movies, posters, magazines, rocks, cars, tools, swords, sand, tshirts, game cartridges, music CDs, videogame consoles, dolls, action figures, computers, letters, stamps, coins, digital files of all kinds, and knives. Anything that you cherish having in great numbers can be a collection.
So what do you collect, and why?
I have a collection of speed cubes ("Rubik's cubes") of various sizes and some of better quality than others. It's one of those things that is easy for people to buy for me. I've got about 20 different cubes, and they are fun puzzles to solves. Other than the 3x3x3, I prefer the even order cubes (4x4x4, 6x6x6, 8x8x8) because they are slightly more challenging than their odd counterparts (5x5x5, 7x7x7, 9x9x9). I have a bunch of cubes with special meaning - my sister got me one from Fan Expo, my brother got a custom one for me for being his best man at his wedding, etc.
I collect a lot of books. We have over 2500 books in our house. We read a lot.
I collect board games. Our board game shelf has hundreds of games. We used to play a lot of games; we mostly play the same 10 now. It is one of our preferred family activities.
I used to collect banknotes, coins and stamps. For now, I'm trying to build a good library, so I'm collecting hardcovers.
PDFs for RPGs that I'm never going to have the time or energy to run, and I'll never convince my table to play. 😅
I feel you. I think I may have more RPG books, pdfs, and magazines than I have individual sessions in my play history. They're fun in their own right, as a tool for guided fantasies about adventures I might have had under other circumstances.
And framed like that, they sound only a half-step away from tabloid celebrity news for a nerd like me.
Same. I have played D&D for a long time now, despite being somewhere between ambivalent to plain bored with the system. Never found a table where people are actively playing other things, but I’d love to :/
I managed to get my group to play Dungeon World, and that's about as far as I've been able to get them to wander from the D&D fold. But yeah, I can definitely sympathize. I'd love to get them to play something like Blades in the Dark or Legacy: Life Among Ruins but it's a tough sell.
I’ve run DW 3-4 times and Blades once. I feel your pain. Would play just about anything that’s different.
I do this for physical copies of RPGs!
The closest thing I have is this: Since 2013, I have been on the lookout for new beers to try, and I've been recording the different beers that I have tasted. I'm up to 87 different beers documented now. The real number is probably somewhere in the 90s, because I hadn't always been diligent to record every beer. I enjoy walking into stores and seeing what's new. I especially like trying to get at local craft beers whenever I travel.
Do you use Untappd, or do you record it in a different way?
I used to do a lot of Untappd, but then I took a break from beer for a while and now... I just don't really. But it's a pretty cool tool.
Untappd looks a lot more "social networky" than I'd like. I use https://www.beeradvocate.com/ .
I guess it does have some social network stuff to it, and maybe that's gotten worse since I stopped using it. I'll check out beeradvocate!
Dogs, maybe? I have three, and I’d love more if it were financially feasible. Realistically, I’ll probably leave a spot open for fostering when one of them passes away.
Until recently I had three as well. One passed away (she was 16 and had a good life) and I thought about fostering, but last time I did that we ended up with our third dog.
Ah, the old foster fail! I’m pretty particular about dogs I want to keep around long term (mostly look for performance prospects), but who knows if that’s the case while fostering. I do think I would have been a great foster for my oldest dog, since she turned out to be much more of a couch potato than I anticipated, and she doesn’t do any dog sports, haha.
Yeah. We took her in during a hurricane when they had to empty out the local shelter for safety. We thought it would be for a week at the most but she ended up getting along well with the two dogs we already had so we kept her.
Several "end of the world" hard drives with backups. Movies, books, TV series, albums in FLAC format, etc. If a Carrington Event wipes out the internet (or I'm short on a bill)--every episode of Star Trek is a file transfer away.
No one wants to end up like this guy.
Would you mind sharing your set up? I just set up jellyfin on a raspberry pi with an external hard drive and I'm interested in falling further down the home media server rabbit hole.
I'm not using anything that approaches home media server territory--just a pile of hard drives and the occasional transfer to my phone when I feel like watching something. The drives are worth their weight in gold if the power goes out, or I'm stuck somewhere without internet access.
How did I know what it was even before clicking? :P
I've got several collections that are basically on pause: Twisty puzzles (Rubik's cubes, but different shapes/sizes/formats)
Yoyos: Pretty straightforward: Responsive (come back), unresponsive (don't come back), various materials (Wood, types of plastic, different metal, different sizes)
Keyboards (definitely not adding to this one): I've got four 40% keyboards (one bluetooth), two 60%s, one 75%, a split 50%, a 50%, and my Ergodox EZ (which I don't use, due to a lack of desk space with my work laptop out).
I've got gameboys from the original to the Advance SP, at least one of each modded with an improved backlight, as well.
I was gifted a mechanical keyboard (75%) last fall, and it is such a nice upgrade. Super portable, which I need since I’m hybrid office/home/coffee shop.
I just use my laptop keyboard if I'm not home, but am temped to just bring a Planck when I travel.
I see we have a lot of similarities. I also listed twisty puzzles, and I have more mechanical keyboards than is reasonable and also won't be buying any more, though I don't have any 40% keyboards (my hands are just too big).
What's your favourite yo yo trick?
I've got more yoyos than I've got tricks so they won't be anything super crazy.
I've got three: PopGun, Erich's Triangle (sort of a rocket ship into a green triangle? I got the name somewhere but can't find a video) and Spirit Bomb because at the time that was the hardest thing I could do. And, I guess anything I can sneak a finger or talon grind into.
I've got huge hands and frankly the 40s are great because you don't have to do any reaches, it's all about using the thumbs to access extra keys instead of reaching way out for the brackets or backspace. It's all built around the same size home row, so it's a smaller board, but not cramped like if you were using a smaller-scale keyboard. Though, I mostly use my Quark Squared in my Preonic case.
Maybe I'll look into a 40 again - I always found that my thumbs were interfering with each other. My thumbs touch / overlap a bit on a keyboard, so I am a fan of only using them for the spacebar most of the time, but maybe with practice it wouldn't be a problem.
Popgun is cool - my daughter has been getting more into yo yos, and has a very nice unresponsive that I got her for Christmas last year, and it's been my first experience with an unresponsive, and it was hard to get into for her (she's 11) and it also blew my mind a bit. I can do some basic tricks, but this just blew my mind with the possibilities it opened up. We're not going too fast, and we're working on Wrist Mount, but gotta start somewhere!
I can kind of understand why people like 60% keyboards (even though I would never get one myself), but what is the appeal of 40% keyboards? Is it the aesthetic, for travel, or something else?
The primary goal is ergonomics. This is acheived by having every key within easy reach frome home row, and utilizing layers with the thumbs to easily use other characters.
They're also small enough that you can position your keyboard and mouse more symmetrically and reach out less with your arm.
I reduced arm reaching by mousing with my left hand.
Probably boring but I suppose I have large quantities of books, indie games and anime fansubs.
I like reading the books and playing the games and I expect they are useful for replaying and re-reading, or lending to friends and family (this has happened, including games through steam family sharing). From observation, I play a much larger part of my game collection than most people.
I'm fairly certain some anime fansubs will be lost forever if not archived; this has already happened with a couple of the ones I had in a hard drive lost to humidity damage (impossible to find them again).
I seem to be amassing a collection of tools. I've found that buying tools to do repair work on the house, bike, car, etc is often cheaper than paying someone else to do the work. The tools essentially pay for themselves. And so, this seems to have led me into a tool collection. My most recent additions are small tools for locksmithing (pushers, picks, shims, key gauges and more) and I've re-keyed several locks in my home, including some old deadbolts and doorknob locks for which I didn't originally have working keys.
I collect rocks and minerals! There's nothing that I love more than staring at the ground and looking for something that catches my eye. They don't have to be fancy minerals or anything, though I have a couple of those, and most of my collection are ones I've found on walks, hikes, pit stops, anywhere and everywhere.
I like trying to figure out what kind of rock is in the area I find the pieces and try to guess what I picked up. I also am a fan of r/whatsthisrock and try to guess what a rock or mineral is. There's just so many neat lil guys on the ground. My dream is to go out to the lake Michigan area as I have heard they have great agate just all over and I want to find a specimen.
I've always loved rocks and my dad gave me a very nice geode when I was like 11. I think he got it from a friend but that just really shot my love for rocks to the moon. I've found so many neat rocks that I love! I need to figure out how to display them. Some rock collection highlights are: one that looks like a piece of toast, a purple/orange rock, a tiny geode looking piece the size of a quarter, what I think is a small fossil/imprint, and a snazzy piece of agate that is white and blue. I cherish the pieces I find the most and they just bring me so much joy to look at.
I would love to see some pictures of your favorites. The toast rock sound especially amusing. :)
I collect lego sets, specifically from the architecture series. They aren’t too expensive (at least as far as legos go). They are small, therefore easy to display. And they are very fun to build, since they often use advanced and intricate techniques. My all time favorite set is the San Francisco skyline. It has so many cool techniques I have never seen before.
I like to collect rare ebooks, the advantage you can store them on any storage device and pass them easily.
I also have some NFTs I know they will be valuable in the future.
I have a growing collection of Irish language novels. It started as strictly a learning exercise, but there's some unique aspects to it that really enhance the collecting experience. The market for books in Irish exists, but it is small, which means that a book usually won't get many print runs. So if you take an interest in a particular book and it wasn't published in the last 15 years or so, you'll need to play detective a bit to find one on the second hand market, and there's always the concern that there simply isn't a copy out there to be found. I've ended up with a few genuinely gorgeous old books from pre-1930, traditional lettering and all, and it's nice knowing for certain that at least one copy exists outside of public libraries because of you keeping it safe.