I'm not sure if this was intentional or a happy accident, but it is extremely funny to me that the screenshot of the news segment on CaskX happens to be showing the stock price for Texas Roadhouse in the ticker. *chef's kiss*
Something I haven't thought about in years: nine year old me learned the truck schedules at Toys'R'Us so I could reduce the number of times I called asking if they had restocked their Pokemon card booster packs. I did genuinely enjoy collecting and playing, but the most important lesson I learned from it was the time at the store's Saturday morning club that a teenager very obviously stacked his deck to beat me in like two turns (and in retrospect, broke actual game mechanic rules in the process). Some people will cheat over absolutely zero stakes, so I can only imagine what they would do for the illusion of quick wealth extraction.
I think a big part of these crazes is that people just do not understand the value of their own time. There is no way that the dudes assaulting people at Target are making enough money doing this to account for all of the time and effort they are losing. Maybe with the pandemic, more people were out of work so the combination of desperation + free time compounded the issue.
Pokemon cards, you say? When I relate this to DC#1, I'm not sure whether to encourage him to be wistful for a rite of summers gone by or to ask how much of his grad school education he thinks he can finance this way.
I would love to sell my old Pokémon cards. I don't play the game, they don't have sentimental value to me, and I could use a little extra moolah. But given that the biggest evaluator is backlogged by months *and* just got taken over by a private equity firm, I know I'd have to settle for selling them ungraded, and I know I'd probably be giving up some more value for the convenience of parting with them. That's not the issue to me; I see it as a convenience fee for being enjoined swiftly and happily with money. It's the ambiguity of *how much* I might be getting ripped off/relinquishing value that bothers me.
That being said, this is a bubble, so I should probably shut up and sell them forthwith.
(i also long ago accepted that this bourbon revival - already bound up in the murky and nebulous concept of 'authenticity' - would not crash and bring down prices for quite some time yet. I have a few favorite cheap bourbons for mixing, and I buy nicer fifths from time to time to go through slowly. Sigh.)
This is impeccably well timed. Just yesterday there was a headline on the most expensive video game ever sold at auction. It’s a copy of Mario 64, and it sold for around $1.5 million. Aside from that being a tremendous waste of money, it’s a shame that the game will sit forever unused.
You said it all already, it’s just a gross system that demands people consume and hoard everything in the hopes that some of it will become useful. The concept of personal enjoyment feels tossed to the wayside.
That said I’ve got a ton of Pokémon cards just chilling in near perfect condition in my closet.
This Pokemon bullshit has really hit home for me. My eldest loves them and we could always make her so happy on Target runs just grabbing a small pack of cards on the way to checkout. So much for that.
I also fell for this nonsense in the 90s with comic books and Spawn toys, with all of the limited editions, foil covers, Target exclusives, etc. I didn't collect them as investments, I actually enjoyed them, but that little voice in my head at the time justifying the waste of all of that money saying they might be worth something one day was an idiot. But at least I liked the stuff and wasn't just screwing over little kids.
Are you telling me that my CD-rom versions of Madden 1998-2005 are going to be worth significant amounts of money? Excuse me while I plan a vacation with my proceeds
I opened this expecting there to be a good reason for me to stop saving my veggie scraps and shells and bones in my freezer.
The War Games analogy is perfect. Every day I try to find ways to “hustle” less. Being a part of that culture has got to be exhausting.
Holy shit, I had never seen the cat tulip painting, but now I have a list of people I need to buy prints of it for.
I'm not sure if this was intentional or a happy accident, but it is extremely funny to me that the screenshot of the news segment on CaskX happens to be showing the stock price for Texas Roadhouse in the ticker. *chef's kiss*
Something I haven't thought about in years: nine year old me learned the truck schedules at Toys'R'Us so I could reduce the number of times I called asking if they had restocked their Pokemon card booster packs. I did genuinely enjoy collecting and playing, but the most important lesson I learned from it was the time at the store's Saturday morning club that a teenager very obviously stacked his deck to beat me in like two turns (and in retrospect, broke actual game mechanic rules in the process). Some people will cheat over absolutely zero stakes, so I can only imagine what they would do for the illusion of quick wealth extraction.
I think a big part of these crazes is that people just do not understand the value of their own time. There is no way that the dudes assaulting people at Target are making enough money doing this to account for all of the time and effort they are losing. Maybe with the pandemic, more people were out of work so the combination of desperation + free time compounded the issue.
Pokemon cards, you say? When I relate this to DC#1, I'm not sure whether to encourage him to be wistful for a rite of summers gone by or to ask how much of his grad school education he thinks he can finance this way.
I would love to sell my old Pokémon cards. I don't play the game, they don't have sentimental value to me, and I could use a little extra moolah. But given that the biggest evaluator is backlogged by months *and* just got taken over by a private equity firm, I know I'd have to settle for selling them ungraded, and I know I'd probably be giving up some more value for the convenience of parting with them. That's not the issue to me; I see it as a convenience fee for being enjoined swiftly and happily with money. It's the ambiguity of *how much* I might be getting ripped off/relinquishing value that bothers me.
That being said, this is a bubble, so I should probably shut up and sell them forthwith.
(i also long ago accepted that this bourbon revival - already bound up in the murky and nebulous concept of 'authenticity' - would not crash and bring down prices for quite some time yet. I have a few favorite cheap bourbons for mixing, and I buy nicer fifths from time to time to go through slowly. Sigh.)
This is impeccably well timed. Just yesterday there was a headline on the most expensive video game ever sold at auction. It’s a copy of Mario 64, and it sold for around $1.5 million. Aside from that being a tremendous waste of money, it’s a shame that the game will sit forever unused.
You said it all already, it’s just a gross system that demands people consume and hoard everything in the hopes that some of it will become useful. The concept of personal enjoyment feels tossed to the wayside.
That said I’ve got a ton of Pokémon cards just chilling in near perfect condition in my closet.
This Pokemon bullshit has really hit home for me. My eldest loves them and we could always make her so happy on Target runs just grabbing a small pack of cards on the way to checkout. So much for that.
I also fell for this nonsense in the 90s with comic books and Spawn toys, with all of the limited editions, foil covers, Target exclusives, etc. I didn't collect them as investments, I actually enjoyed them, but that little voice in my head at the time justifying the waste of all of that money saying they might be worth something one day was an idiot. But at least I liked the stuff and wasn't just screwing over little kids.
As a former HOA president, I was so very afraid this was going to be a post about NextDoor. I may be scarred.
Are you telling me that my CD-rom versions of Madden 1998-2005 are going to be worth significant amounts of money? Excuse me while I plan a vacation with my proceeds
Love this.