Adjusting Our Practices To Serve You Better

Well, we managed to burn through the backlog pretty nicely, taking us all the way up to 40 with few glitches. Sadly, I wasn't quite able to set up another backlog, which gives us this unfortunate gap. Hopefully I'll be able to shoot some more items soon and put them up, which will get everything rolling again.

In short- No entry for this Thursday or Friday, but everything should be moving along again come Monday. Fingers crossed.

Item Number 40: Glasses, Black

Time in possession: 2 years now maybe? I honestly couldn't say for sure without doing some serious Internet sleuthing.

Description: Black plastic glasses with white "marble" inside detailing. No idea what brand. Very strong prescription. Kind of beat up (left arm is pretty wobbly) but are the height of nerdy/artist fashion. Or so I'm trying to convince people.

Cost: With lenses, these babies set me back something in the ballpark of $260. They do have all sorts of fancy scratch resistant, glare resistant, x-ray vision enabling, etc. coatings on them though. ...I wish they really did give me x-ray vision. That would be awesome.

Story: One of the projects that inspired this one was a project where this guy sold everything he owned on eBay. I can't find the project with a quick Internet search sadly, but it was published as a book and was a fun read. Several of his items were bought by friends of his but never picked up, his glasses being one of them, presumably because his friend didn't want the project's creator to walk around blind. If I did the same thing, I don't know if I could have made that gamble. I'm not saying my friends are jerks (well, some of them are jerks) but without my glasses I am blind.

When I buy glasses I always do two things: I buy two pairs, because of my uncanny ability to lose things, and I buy pairs that look like they could take a bit of a beating. While this pair haven't seen the worst of my glasses transgressions (at the moment the best on was probably when I fell off a snow bank and didn't' find my glasses until 6 months later) but they have had more than enough abuse in the years they have resided on my face. They have been dropped, hit off of me, taken off too quickly for their own good and fallen into the garbage can by my bed on several occasions. Frankly, the fact that they still hold themselves on my head and do their job is a small miracle.

When I was originally told that I needed glasses, I was told that my vision would continue to deteriorate until I was 21. I'm 24 now and while on my last eye exam my prescription had changed slightly these glasses still work well enough and I'm happy for it. Replacing your glasses every year is a huge pain in the ass and even with vision coverage from my library job and from acting, it's pretty damn expensive too.

Item Number 39: Mini Filing Cabinet (and contents!)

Time in possession: 2 or 3 years

Description: Grey plastic "filing cabinet", designed to hold business cards. Top cabinet contains a small digital clock. Current contents are several dozen Nintendo Game Boy e-reader cards, several pieces of expired or seldom used ID, misc client cards, a padlock, some extra keys and other useful crap to have nearby and at hand.

Cost: The Cabinet itself reminds me of the kind of thing you'd buy for Regal for $7, so let's put it there. We'll also add in the e-reader cards (the complete set of all the NES classics plus a few extras from magazines and the like), $.99 a pop x13 sets (yay for failed media!) and the cost of the lock and other various crap that lives in there ($2.99! No real reason!) and we've got ourselves a grand total of $22.86

Story: This little guy sits on my actual filing cabinet (which doubles as an end-table) right beside the head of my bed and next to my ancient alarm clock (a future entry for later). Having a fake filing cabinet on top of a real one fulfills some sort of divine aesthetic in my mind. Yeah, I'm probably a little crazy.

I got this filing cabinet for Christmas one year, probably as a stocking stuffer the year I asked for a real filing cabinet and actually got it. My parents like playing jokes like that. In my extended family once you're 18 you join a pool and buy one gift for one family member. One year I asked my uncle for something off a list of games. When I opened his gift I found a ratty red sweater. After my folks got a good chuckle out of it, they revealed his actual gift. I guess my parents can be jerks some times.

There's something nice about having this cabinet. It holds all the cards that would otherwise get tossed into random drawers and mason jars and plastic tubs. It is the perfect balance of order along with the ability to just toss something in there and forget about it. You know, this post will one day be used to disassemble my fractured psyche and determine the exact point I went off the deep end. On that not, I think I'll leave you all. Have a good one.

Item Number 38: Portable Game System, Sega Game Gear (x3)

Time in possession: Between 6 and 4 years, depending on the individual unit.

Description: 3 Sega Game Gear systems, all suffering from various degrees of abandon. Only one of the systems actually works for any length of time, although I haven't checked in a while so that may no longer be true.

Cost: One of these systems belonged to an ex-girlfriend who was done with it, but I honestly can't remember where I came across another two. If I had to guess one of them would have been bought at a flea market (I'd often buy boxes filled with old video game stuff from people who weren't aware of what they were selling or just didn't care) and another off an eBay case lot. Really though, I couldn't tell you for sure. Lets just say $40 for the lot. That's actually pretty generous considering.

Story: I didn't know a lot about video games when I was a kid. I mean, I did read all the game magazines I could get my hands on and played as many as my parents would allow me, but in hindsight there wasn't a lot of thought going into my video game selections. The early games I nearly broke myself trying to beat on my NES? Mission Impossible, Werewolf, Iron Sword? They really, really sucked. If not for my childhood ignorance and stubborn drive I wouldn't have played any of those games for any length of time. I certainly wouldn't now. All that being said, I always, even back then, knew that the Game Gear was a shitty system.

The Sega Game Gear was Sega's answer to the Game Boy, a phenomenally more successful machine. (according to the ever reliable wikipedia the Game Boy sold 69 million units while the Game Gear only managed 8.9) Now before I go off sounding like a Nintendo fan boy (which, to be honest, I am) there were some nice features on the Game Gear: It had a colour screen which was back lit, a feature that would take Nintendo over a decade to implement in their own handhelds. It was easier for many people to hold, being wider. It eventually got a TV tuner, turning the system into a portable TV which was a pretty neat use of the technology. See, already I'm grasping at straws. The system's flaws more then make up the difference here: The colour screen was prone to becoming a blurred mess and worse than that was prone to burning out (the problem with two of my systems). The machine was a battery monster, chewing through 6AAs typically in 5 hours. Those batteries made the thing a heavy brick (just what you want in a portable electronic device!) and the worst sin of all: It didn't have any good games.

It is telling that when the original Game Boy was being given the intense shot in the arm that was Pokemon ('98) the Game Gear had already petered off into nothingness, dropped from support and forgotten. Owning one, I find myself seldom drawn to do anything with the system, although should a bugler ever break in I would not be opposed to hucking it at their head. These things have got to be good for something, right?

(Edit: Actually, they are good for something! They allowed this post to use both the "broken" and the "broken?" tags. Nobody cares except me...)

Item Number 37: Home Made Wine, Half-Box

Time in possession: About a year and a half.

Description: A box of home made wine, White Zinfandel to be exact. 9 bottles in the photo, and I'm pretty sure there are a couple in my fridge. Those are the remains of an original batch of about 26 bottles. Bottled with love. And thrift!

Cost: $100 for the wine and $10 for the bottles. That's one hundred and ten dollars of pure alcoholism! Ahoy!

Story: My friend Kevins mom runs a side business making and bottling wine. After a couple of years drinking alongside him and enjoying his wine, I finally decided to get myself a batch, a decision made all the easier by a student price of $100 for the batch. $4 for a bottle of delicious wine? A whole bunch of them so I'm not likely to run out any time soon? Knowing that nobody spit in your alcohol duing the bottling process? I'm in!

Together with Kevin and his mom we put this batch together and I'm proud to say that I can with no shame bring a bottle out to a fancy party (well, as fancy a party as I'm ever invited to), hand over as a gift to friends or pop open and drown my sorrows in a torrent of wine-y goodness.

Also, having a bunch of wine in your room? Classy.

Item Number 36: ComputerLand Duffel Bag

Time in possession: Roundabouts 16 years.

Description: Black duffel bag, featuring logos for the long-since defunct company ComputerLand. The zippers and detailing is done in the worst early 90s indigo imaginable, but make the bag pretty visible off of airport conveyor belts. At this point the bag is broken at several points- The main compartment in particular has a broken zipper and a Velcro latch that is hanging on by a thread. Well used, you know?

Cost: This was a freebie given to my dad when he worked there and then later appropriated by me, so let's call it a $1.99 Value Village special.

Story: Material possessions for many people are tangible signs of their progression, through adulthood, through the ranks of status, whatever. This bag, to me, was a sign of my growing older and a tangible sign of my own personal owning of property. When I went travelling (with my family most of the time- I was 8 when I first started using it!) this was my bag and in it went my things. I packed it, I kept track of what I had in it and carried it to and from the places I went. My bag, my belongings, my status symbol of maturity and responsibility.

Plus, having never played hockey, it was the closest thing that I've ever had to a hockey bag and I always thought that they were cool.

This bag has been all over with me. It's been all around North America, and to Scotland at least once. In addition to clothes it has held beer, video game systems, RPG crap, Halloween costume props and once, a puppy. At this point it is in dire need of replacement, but it works well enough for it's semi-retired duties, and really, there are so many memories with this bag it's hard to let go. I get the impression that it will probably fall apart at the seams before I decide to trash it, and if that's the case, then it will be with me a long while still.

Item Number 35: Game Controller, V3 FX Racing Wheel (PSX)

Time in possession: Around 4 years, but probably a few more.

Description: Black plastic steering wheel and pedals, for use with the Sony Playstation. Pretty damn near caked in dust. I mean, I'm looking at them on my bed in that picture and I feel like I need to sneeze. Gross.

Cost: While I want to say $10, my memory is pushing me towards $15, which is kind of shameful.

Story: This item was purchased during my initial foray into the local flea markets. Usually whenever I find a new source of cool crap (eBay, pawn shops, flea markets, trips to places where people don't like crap that I have become obsessed with) I very quickly both a)Lose Money and b)Accumulate said crap. Now this isn't usually an issue, except in my buying frenzy, I usually end up with one or two things like this. No, on paper there is nothing wrong with my owning a V3 FX Racing Wheel , but that paper is excluding the fact that a)I don't really like racing games, b)I own one racing game for my Playstation and c)I've played that game on my Playstation once, just to see if it worked.

It doesn't help that said game, Driver, starts with a stupidly difficult training level that requires you to successfully pull of a bunch of manoeuvres that you might never require in actual game play. Still, if you can't do them all (and I couldn't!) then you can't play the game. Frustration abounds. Now, I'm all for challenge in games and I do feel that content can be locked to give the player a sense of progress as they go through the game, but when the entire game is shut off to you until you jump through a bunch of arbitrary hoops... well, that's just dump.

Rant = off. Now you might have noticed the dust that adorns this controller, truly pointing it out as a abandoned peripheral. That's the other problem with the thing. I've got plenty of controllers that I never use (that kind of happens when you own well over 50 individual controllers for dozens of systems) but this one is so damn big that the only place I could find for it was on top of a bookshelf which is pretty high on my list of places where I never stumble across things. Also, the controller isn't even that good.

To give you an idea about this whole new-place-buy-fest phenomenon, about 2 or 3 months after buying this bad boy I came across a similar controller for the Nintendo 64. I came this close to getting it, despite the fact that a)I didn't own ANY racing games for the N64 and b)I hadn't touched this thing since making sure that it worked. I think this is proof that I am, indeed, a consumer whore.

And how!