Random thoughts...

[Ben Staad]

I have been fortunate enough over the last 14 years to be able to pursue my passion for collecting small press specialty books. Due to a crazy, soon to be ex-wife, I find myself in a position to step back from my collecting.

It's a weird moment for me. I am losing two things I love dearly. My wife and collecting books.

Just give me a silent, "Atta, Boy." and I will certainly feel the good vibes rolling in.

She put me in a tough spot which is requiring me to buy her out of the house among other things.

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." I'm not a very religious person but I remind myself that a few moments of discomfort will ultimately leave me a better and stronger person and that there is always a path forward either from divine intervention or rainbow farting Unicorns. Pick one.

Either way I will still be around and drooling even more heavily at all of the fantastic new books you folks will be taunting me with.

[Sock Monkey]

Thanks for the input, everyone! It was a tough call of which way to go, but everyone's suggestions help clear the fog a bit. I did go with Option #2, getting the the book to complete a set I've been working on. It's a book I've been looking for quite awhile and every time I find a copy it is out of my reach financially. Very excited to have this in my hands! I'll post in the Latest Purchase thread once it arrives.

[RonClinton]

Why is it that when it rains it pours with book collecting? I’ve had a relative dry spell with aftermarket searches lately and now I’ve found too many:

1. I located a matching set of books I need that has the specific number I’ve been looking for.
2. Also located a book that would complete a set I’ve been working on at I price I can actually afford.
3. Tracked down two Thunderstorm titles that have been on my list since I missed out on them.

i can’t afford them all so I’m gonna have to make a tough call. Anybody got any thoughts?

I'd go with #2 first, then #1, then #3. First complete the set that's almost done, then turn to matching number needs, then focus on titles that would be nice to have but simply weren't bought at the time of release.

[Dave1442397]

Why is it that when it rains it pours with book collecting? I’ve had a relative dry spell with aftermarket searches lately and now I’ve found too many:

1. I located a matching set of books I need that has the specific number I’ve been looking for.
2. Also located a book that would complete a set I’ve been working on at I price I can actually afford.
3. Tracked down two Thunderstorm titles that have been on my list since I missed out on them.

i can’t afford them all so I’m gonna have to make a tough call. Anybody got any thoughts?

Is there something else you could sell that could be replaced easily enough as funds allow?

[mhatchett]

Why is it that when it rains it pours with book collecting? I’ve had a relative dry spell with aftermarket searches lately and now I’ve found too many:

1. I located a matching set of books I need that has the specific number I’ve been looking for.
2. Also located a book that would complete a set I’ve been working on at I price I can actually afford.
3. Tracked down two Thunderstorm titles that have been on my list since I missed out on them.

i can’t afford them all so I’m gonna have to make a tough call. Anybody got any thoughts?

Follow your heart Man, you know which one/ones you really want. Or money be damned, I'll sell something later, I'm getting them all....Which is what I would probably do HAHA!!

[saginawhorror]

Why is it that when it rains it pours with book collecting? I’ve had a relative dry spell with aftermarket searches lately and now I’ve found too many:

1. I located a matching set of books I need that has the specific number I’ve been looking for.
2. Also located a book that would complete a set I’ve been working on at I price I can actually afford.
3. Tracked down two Thunderstorm titles that have been on my list since I missed out on them.

i can’t afford them all so I’m gonna have to make a tough call. Anybody got any thoughts?

Despite how much I like them I would give the thunderstorm books the lowest priority.

[Sock Monkey]

Why is it that when it rains it pours with book collecting? I’ve had a relative dry spell with aftermarket searches lately and now I’ve found too many:

1. I located a matching set of books I need that has the specific number I’ve been looking for.
2. Also located a book that would complete a set I’ve been working on at I price I can actually afford.
3. Tracked down two Thunderstorm titles that have been on my list since I missed out on them.

i can’t afford them all so I’m gonna have to make a tough call. Anybody got any thoughts?

[TacomaDiver]

I think my brain is finished sometimes.

I can't seem to spell empty right when I code at work - not occasionally, but EVERY DAMN TIME! And then I copy the wrong spelling a few dozen times and then it's a mess to clean up.

If you're wondering - this is what I do:

If (IsEmpty([xxx]) OrElse Not IsDate([yyyyy])) AndAlso Not IsEmpty([zzzzz]) Then ......

Empty is is important. And damnit, I spelled one wrong here now.

[Ben Staad]

Glad I'm not the only one. I think my issue is maybe similar to yours. I'm thinking way faster than I'm typing and things just get missed.

I've found myself doing that, too. This started popping up on work emails for me. My brain is faster than my typing so I found myself dropping words due to being further along in my thoughts than I was in my typing. I sometimes over-estimate my typing skills so I feel that I'm keeping up, but I'm really not. I also think that due to the ease of communicating via email and on social media platforms, we don't proofread much if at all.

[Sock Monkey]

I've noticed that on the forum/social media posts and with work emails I am starting to skip whole words in my sentences. Age or something more sinister? Probably should run this one by a doctor but honestly I am sick to death of going to the doctor.

I even caught a missing "and" above when I re-read this before posting.

I've found myself doing that, too. This started popping up on work emails for me. My brain is faster than my typing so I found myself dropping words due to being further along in my thoughts than I was in my typing. I sometimes over-estimate my typing skills so I feel that I'm keeping up, but I'm really not. I also think that due to the ease of communicating via email and on social media platforms, we don't proofread much if at all.

[Ben Staad]

I've noticed that on the forum/social media posts and with work emails I am starting to skip whole words in my sentences. Age or something more sinister? Probably should run this one by a doctor but honestly I am sick to death of going to the doctor.

I even caught a missing "and" above when I re-read this before posting.

[TacomaDiver]

So my wife and I recently moved and as one does when they move, I was frustrated by just how much stuff we had. Now that we are kinda settled in the new house, we are going through and evaluating all of our stuff. What we need, what we can toss. This includes my comic book collection. I was a collector throughout my childhood and off-an-on during my teen years, going full-tilt between the ages of 18 and 23 where I would buy around 100 comics a month. My comic collecting waxed and waned a couple of times over the years, but my last foray ended in 2011. DC's reboot of their whole universe gave me a jumping off point and I wound up focusing on limited edition books instead.

Now that we've moved, I was going through all my comics deciding on what to keep and what I could get rid of and I realized I had a bunch of stuff from the end of my collecting phase that I just never got around to reading. I spent time organizing it all and I have somewhere around 900+ comics that I just never read, including the entirety of Grant Morrison's Batman run (and all the various other titles during that time). I'm trying to decide if I want to open this can of worms and start reading through all these. It seems like a waste of money to have paid for all of them to just let them sit in a box...

At times I regret dumping my comic collection back in the day. I think I've purged it twice, maybe three times. But it does just become more stuff to haul (since I had to move half way across the country in 2019, I'm well aware of how much stuff we have . . .) and it's not like I"m displaying anything or actually reading anything.

I struggle with comics in general. I've really enjoyed the digital experience and I look at all of the trades I have and wonder if I was better off buying the digital versions rather than the physical . . . but I'm still very partial to physical media (I still buy DVDs/Blurays/UHDs because streaming is not up to par in quality yet ...)

I did dump all of my CDs after I moved here. I did re-rip them into iTunes at the lossless bitrate. If movies were as easy to do that with, I would probably do that too. But another advantage of physical media is I always have it.

We watched The Gentelmen on Netflix the other night (latest Guy Ritchie movie) and it was really good, so it made me want to visit Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, along with Snatch, both of which my wife has never seen. No need to find it streaming, assuming it's even available, I just grabbed the disc off the shelf.

Whew - this was the random thoughts thread.

[mhatchett]

I think a number of us are of an age that we look at our books/collections and say "Am I going to read that again." It's time to start letting some things go, but man, saying good-bye is hard LOL!!

[Ben Staad]

I feel your pain. I collected in my yearly teens through my early 20s and have a steamer chest of mostly poor condition comics and another 5 or 6 boxes of the good stuff. No idea what to do with them. The steamer chest has piles of comics I read numerous times and were likely from a flea market my mom took me to about once a month. Loved going there until I found the good stuff in the Erie, PA comic book store.

Feel like I should empty out the steamer chest and chuck them. But some part of my hoarder brain will not let me. That chest moved with me 28-29 years ago and has literally been around the world with their moldering and yellowed pages tagging along.

I also have a mess of sports cards in various condition. MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL. There is some money in those but I don't really have the energy to sell them one by one on EBAY.

So my wife and I recently moved and as one does when they move, I was frustrated by just how much stuff we had. Now that we are kinda settled in the new house, we are going through and evaluating all of our stuff. What we need, what we can toss. This includes my comic book collection. I was a collector throughout my childhood and off-an-on during my teen years, going full-tilt between the ages of 18 and 23 where I would buy around 100 comics a month. My comic collecting waxed and waned a couple of times over the years, but my last foray ended in 2011. DC's reboot of their whole universe gave me a jumping off point and I wound up focusing on limited edition books instead.

Now that we've moved, I was going through all my comics deciding on what to keep and what I could get rid of and I realized I had a bunch of stuff from the end of my collecting phase that I just never got around to reading. I spent time organizing it all and I have somewhere around 900+ comics that I just never read, including the entirety of Grant Morrison's Batman run (and all the various other titles during that time). I'm trying to decide if I want to open this can of worms and start reading through all these. It seems like a waste of money to have paid for all of them to just let them sit in a box...

[Sock Monkey]

So my wife and I recently moved and as one does when they move, I was frustrated by just how much stuff we had. Now that we are kinda settled in the new house, we are going through and evaluating all of our stuff. What we need, what we can toss. This includes my comic book collection. I was a collector throughout my childhood and off-an-on during my teen years, going full-tilt between the ages of 18 and 23 where I would buy around 100 comics a month. My comic collecting waxed and waned a couple of times over the years, but my last foray ended in 2011. DC's reboot of their whole universe gave me a jumping off point and I wound up focusing on limited edition books instead.

Now that we've moved, I was going through all my comics deciding on what to keep and what I could get rid of and I realized I had a bunch of stuff from the end of my collecting phase that I just never got around to reading. I spent time organizing it all and I have somewhere around 900+ comics that I just never read, including the entirety of Grant Morrison's Batman run (and all the various other titles during that time). I'm trying to decide if I want to open this can of worms and start reading through all these. It seems like a waste of money to have paid for all of them to just let them sit in a box...