Monday, November 3, 2008

The Great Purge of 2008

I'm in the midst of some housecleaning, at least as it pertains to my hobbies. Since the end of the summer, I've been selling off a lot of my comics and gaming stuff in order to free up some closet/shelf space for a more "distilled" version of my hobbies. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will...simply put, I'm tired of moving boxes of stuff around to find what I want.

In practice, this has amounted to a rash of eBay auctions lately...four to five comic book lots each week for nearly a month, so far. I've also taken a few loads of books to Half Price Books; last night's haul funded my purchase of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, which I've wanted to read for quite some time.

The problem, of course, is my own internal eBay policy. I allow myself to shop for new gaming stuff using only the funds I've acquired by selling off my own stuff, which helps keep my finances in order and lets me stay motivated to churn through unused bits of my collection. Last summer I sold off my Warhammer 40k armies; this summer it's comics. I'm having a tough time finding RPG books that I can let go. Plus my swelling Paypal account has me shopping more frequently on eBay...for the very stuff that I might end up selling off in another year or two. In fact, a careful read of my online commerce habits could even show that my purge is backfiring; my overall geek merchandise volume might be growing. I'll let you know next time I try to pack it all up in boxes.

2 comments:

Donny_the_DM said...

part of the ebb and flow of being a gamer...old for the new and all that.

I was wondering to myself just yesterday, how long I will be keeping my 3.5 collection (62 fracking books!) not to mention the stack of nostalgia inducing 2e and 3.0 stuff I found in the closet...

The simple answer for me was, look at it again next year :)

Bonemaster said...

I try to thin things out every year or so. Sadly, I'm not doing as good a job as I should have. I'd say I don't use at least 90% of what's on my gaming shelf. It's hard to know what to get rid off. You always think to yourself, maybe I can use this somehow or I'm not going to play this game again, but I still have fond memories for it. In the case of a few books, few people even know this game exists and few still have ever seen a copy. Still, I have a fun time reading some of the old school games I have.