I think for me it’s retro games, specifically. I used to have been in the used video games market for 5 years from 2008 to 2012. My goal was to construct a personal video game collection, physical copies of games I personally enjoyed growing up.
I was registered on a game trading site which served as the base of my business, I’ve made rounds of thrift store hopping and any used games market I could find locally. I’ve struck amazingly good deals and I might’ve had luck on my side a few times (for example, a guy on that game trading site gave me a free copy of Super Metroid that I got to choose for a minor mistake he felt he needed to honor.)
And I felt like I was incredibly close to completing my personal collection until 2012, I ran into some dumb drama with my sister and ex girlfriend back then. They racked up the cable bill in my name that I was trying to cancel and they wouldn’t let me cancel it until I turned in all equipment. And I was jobless at the time too, having lost my job. So I needed to sell some things and sure enough, had to sacrifice my entire collection at the time that I spent 5 long years building.
I never recovered since and this was during the golden period where it was still fairly fun to collect and everybody wasn’t pretending to be a pawn shop.
I would try continuing what collection of games I’ve tried to build, through Steam but it wasn’t the same. Nowadays, the used video games market has turned into just a platform full of resellers, pawn brokers and stingy greedy collectors.
I find it very cheapening that people treat games like they’re just tools of trade. They mean nothing and they’re treated like nothing except to make a quick buck, however possible.
It’s only worsened thanks to Goodwill and similar thrift stores, getting in on it where everyone pays too much attention as to what the prices go for on EBay and VGPC.
And we have WATA involved that hasn’t made things better. Thanks for shitting on an honest hobby, assholes.
Running Linux used to be a hobby of mine. But nowadays it’s so easy and problem-free, it’s just my OS.
I tried to run linux on both my machines and they both have separate problems and i can’t get it to work. I feel so dumb whenever i read: just put in a usb drive and you have linux
Yeah, Linux is great, but most people using (and recommending) it understate the complexity of an OS installation.
Generally, it should just work, with a couple of if’s that aren’t mentioned enough:
If your PC is newer than the Linux kernel your distro ships, you’ll run into issues.
As a rule of thumb, a PC that is 3 years old will be supported on any distro. If it’s newer, you should try Fedora or Ubuntu. If it’s brand new, Manjaro.
If you don’t know how or don’t want to disable Secure Boot, use Ubuntu.
To test both issues, use a Live USB. If this boots, it will boot after installation.This should get you to a system that boots on your PC. From there on, there will be some troubleshooting steps that can’t be described for all systems. (The steps that are relevant for all systems are already done by the installer)
That being said, this isn’t a Linux issue. Windows installation isn’t really any easier, it’s just usually done before you even touch the PC.
Collectibles always turn into a money making / investment opportunity for people. Like with Magic the gathering and the whole reprint vs reserved list debacle. That was solely created to “protect those who were investing”
It kind of sounds like OP morphed from hobbyist to investor, then lost interest when his investment lost value.
There’s a lot of hobbies that offer a path to professional, and I’ve watched friends go down that path. It’s rarely a good experience - there’s all kind of things you have to do as a professional to make a living that you can blow off as a hobbyist/volunteer. There’s a lot more stress when success or failure is tied to whether you eat or not. You lose a lot of freedom to tell dickheads to fuck off.
Never been into collectibles, myself, but the investment pressure seems insidious. Like, it’s one thing to trade cards among friends because you got doubles of something your buddy’s missing, but buying a rare card because it’s “underpriced” to hold until its price recovers is very different. The money is pressure to change from looking at your collection as good, fun, or complete and to looking at its presumptive cash value. Then you’ve stopped being a collector and started being a businessman.
It kind of sounds like you didnt hother reading the post
I didn’t know making a personal collection constituted as being an ‘investor’. Learn something new everyday. /s
I mean it’s in the word - personal. When you’re making personal collections, you aren’t in it for the money or what ways you can flip what you get for an investment.
Making huge leaps of assumption, you are. Christ.
You should take a look at game prices for anything older than PS2/GameCube (and even some games from that era are obscenely expensive). For a long time, LSD: Dream Emulator was one of the most expensive games you could get at around $200 for a pristine copy. Nowadays, there are a ton of games that are >$200 for a junk, beat-up copy. The price skyrocketed thanks to WATA/Heritage Auctions doing a lot of suspected pump and dumping that, as a couple examples, got an LoZ copy sold for nearly $900,000 and a copy of Super Mario Bros sold for nearly $700,000. Afaik the only known copy Chu-Teng didn’t sell for that much, and that was considered to be lost media.
Even if all you want is to have a copy of Banjo-Kazooie then have fun forking over $20ish for a loose cartridge or >$100 if you want the box and manual. That’s not how it used to be. Used to be that you could get a loose cartridge for like, $2 in a bundle of 10 of them.
Fuck WATA.
Edit: this also applies to old computers. Remember when you could get a beige CRT by the side of the road for free? Have fun paying >$50 for a shitty CRT, >$200 for a decent one, and >$1000 for a good one. It’s not just CRTs either; basically anything to do with old PCs is becoming obscenely expensive as well.
For the CRTs at least that makes sense, because they used to be mass manufactured, everybody had one, and then new tech came out so nobody wanted them anymore. They threw them out or sold them for cheap. Now that that glut of CRTs has cleared out, they’re probably relatively rare, and people aren’t manufacturing much of them anymore.
I think that probably applies to lots of things.
The same thing applies to game cartridges that the OP was collecting. As time goes on and the pool of interest rises and the number of items are reduced, prices will skyrocket because of supply and demand.
Magic has been awful since around the time they started doing master collection things. I don’t even know what it’s called. Masterpiece artifacts was the first one. If I had to point to a specific turning point. I don’t even play anymore but holy hell there’s like a billion forms of every card in each set now. It used to just be a normal a foil (premium). Now it feels like there are 8 forms of each card.
Magic the Gathering.
I played religiously in high school. Competed in tournaments every weekend. But around Stronghold, they just started churning out expansion after expansion after expansion, and even placing high in most tournaments, i just couldn’t keep up with the older guys that had incomes. So, i quit.
When Commander came out, i tried to play again, but it just felt different. It was more about who had the coolest mat, or who had the newest combo. It felt monetized, and i didn’t like it. The final straw for me was when i found out they did a promo expansion with My Little Pony… If you like MLP, cool. More power to you. But i HATE MLP with a rage that could scour all life from existence. My little sister was obsessed, and that meant it was in my face for a decade at least. Can’t stand that shit, and wizards going cash grab during the height of the bronie movement just killed the last of my good will.
Man, if you thought 1998 had too many expansions…
Wizards of the Coast was bought by Hasbro in 1999, but only in the last five years or so have they really seemed to open the floodgates with all the Hasbro and other IP crossovers, multiple versions of every card, etc. It’s not surprising since other toy sales seem to be in a slump, but it’s wild that Magic is keeping one of the world’s largest toy companies in the black.
Try to remember that price and value are not the same thing and that people value things differently.
Also, markets will exploit and commodify anything they can. It’s hard to have a passion which is completely unpolluted by this, unless you can find one so niche that it goes unnoticed.
No. When I take up a hobby, it’s because I like the thing, not because it’s cool, or different, or whatever.
I like guns, I like shooting, I enjoy going to competitions–even if I’m not very good–and I’d love it if I could get more people into it, even if they’re ‘gaming’ competitions. (And make no mistake, there are a lot of people that do everything they can to game a competition stage, just to shave .2s off their time, or increase their hit factor by .1.) Yeah, it’s expensive–I think I burned about $200 in ammunition I’d reloaded last weekend–and ‘cheapening’ it would make it much easier to practice more.
I used to go to a place that would regularly host its own competitions, and would handily break down stage scores for you on their website afterward. It was rewarding to compete against your past self for time.
I think that all my scores are up on Practiscore; I don’t usually bother checking, since I have a pretty good idea of how well I’m doing when I’m there.
Podcasting
I love listening to podcasts, but almost never the ones that everyone goes on about. I like ones made by people with a passion for storytelling, or ones that serve as people’s journals, y’know?
I’ve made my own podcasts over the past 15 years or so, but a few years back I gave up. The barrier to entry lowering so sharply meant an influx of them, making it basically impossible to get mine heard. So I’d spend 8/10 hours making my 15 minute episodes sound as perfect as I could for them to get 5 listens. I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for me, but ultimately I wanted people to hear my efforts.
So I got burned out and at some point just abandoned the whole thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful that anyone can pick up their phone and bang out a professional sounding piece of audio, but between that and the likes of Spotify throwing cash at the already big names, it became impossible to stand out without having your own marketing budget.
I’m not one of the people actually complaining about it (despite what people say, it is ideal to prepare), but I’m one of those artists who changed course due to AI, though there are some things exclusive to us.
Computer hardware and video games. I got into around 2014 and it felt like a magical time during technical strides, and waves of incredibly powerful hardware coming out year after year. Great games were being released and nobody could wait for what could be possible in just a few years. In 2024 I basically quit. I have vowed to never build another “hot rod” again.
It was a slow realization that this new, faster hardware, was only making AAA devs lazy. I remember just a few years ago most games could be played with 2gb of VRAM. Nowadays you want 8gb, minimum. These new games aren’t much more advanced, or look any better, they have terrible optimization because they can.
That combined with increased monetization and prices for shitty, unfinished games made me realize there’s no value here left anymore. Another major factor is that games are getting longer and longer, just for the sake of occupying your time. As an adult I have much better things to do than grind for a single item, or caring for a virtual plant.
A single game that’s 50 hours long will consume weeks of free time, while being excruciatingly boring for much of it. So much of that time could be used for real life skills, that will improve my life (cooking and woodworking, currently)
I can complete multiple projects in the time it takes to complete a single game. These projects will enrich my life for years afterwards, but time spent on grindy games have only left regrets
I still enjoy the occasional indie game, or games with friends (L4D2 and TF2) but I no longer enjoy most games, and no longer have an ambition to finish my steam library. I am perfectly content with my unplayed games.
Hopefully this makes sense, just wanted to get this nagging feeling out for a while.
I was told in 2009 “Why optimize? Hardware upgrades will make your efforts obsolete anyway.” So… I devoted my time to optimization, because fuck that. I ended up doing algorithm optimization in my first full time job, and loved… That part of the job at least.
Indie games and co-op games are my jam. I feel for all of this comment.
Competitive multiplayer games.
Every one of these kinds of games now revolves around trying to sell you more garbage and not on being a fun game to play. If they don’t do well at selling shit, but do do well at being a good game they get shut down and you can’t play it anymore because the dev/publisher runs all the servers instead of allowing the players to run their own. Matchmaking systems make finding cool people you actually like playing with harder, and so many players are just absolute dumpster fires of toxic human beings with no sense of sportsmanship or even normal human decency.
Tech. The same people who got into law of medicine came here. No love for the platform. Love of money.
So I used to be massively into warhammer 30k and 40k, I have over 100k of points of models probably over 200k. I used to have one of the largest book collections going, over £12k worth when I sold it. Yet I dropped out the hobby after several decades because
*My main army is space marines and they started killing them off so that they could reissue the entire range but worse *They dumbed down the rules progressively more and more *30k rollout and tournament support just stopped meaning that my huge investment didn’t get used anywhere near enough *models became more monopose
- New book releases of the same quality just stopped, because they wouldn’t pay to keep the big name authors
Plenty of people like the new direction, I don’t as it stole the ground from under me and required I rebuy in for worse.
not so much a hobby, but there was a rapper I was following who used to respond to you on Snapchat before his following got too big. I lost interest after the personal touch was gone
I still like his music, but I’m not as passionate of a fan as I once was
Magic: The Gathering.
As soon as they made a rule that you can’t have a deck of 30 Black Lotused and 30 Fireballs, I just gave up. What’s the point if I can’t have fun?
And now they expect you to shower as well
so the quarterpounder would have been banned regardless of harassment
Every kind of hobby ultimately rests on some different kinds of reward mechanisms. Whether it’s the thrill of winning at a competition, the excitement of discovery, or the satisfaction of accomplishment, these sorts of positive emotions are what keep a hobby interesting and engaging for us. Collecting is no different, and this is where I believe the problems start.
Collecting as a hobby gets its main motivator from acquiring rare stuff. While there is a learning component to it (learning about all the stuff that’s out there, the history, why some things are rare and others are not, and what fair market prices are for everything) and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment (from gazing at a completed collection), the main drive that keeps people engaged is the excitement of unboxing and taking possession of new and rare item.
Unfortunately, this is an extremely fleeting and hollow emotion. It can last as little as a few minutes and rarely lasts more than a few days. In the long run, I believe this is what leads people to lose interest in collecting: they simply run out of rare stuff to obtain and thus lose the excitement they once had. Some even get so frustrated and disillusioned by collecting that they go out of their way to destroy or sell off their collections, often experiencing an enormous sense of relief afterwards (but potentially also a sense of loss and regret).
Contrast this with hobbies based around making or fixing stuff: making wine, brewing beer, gardening, cooking and baking, repairing old clocks or TVs or computers, restoring old cars, woodworking or blacksmithy or hobby machining, making jewellery or clothing, programming video games. These hobbies all differ from collecting because they’re focused on learning and personal growth. For example, there is a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to pick a few jalapeño peppers off the plants you raised from seeds, but the ultimate driver is the thrill of learning how to better take care of plants so that next time they grow even bigger and healthier than before!
Likewise with a repair hobby such as fixing old clocks: each one you come across (and there is some overlap with collecting here) has a unique history with a unique set of challenges to overcome if you are to get the thing repaired and running again good as new. But it differs from collecting in that the biggest satisfaction arrives at the end, when you complete the repair, rather than the beginning when you unbox the clock.
Some of the other making/crafting/food hobbies also provide additional satisfaction when you’re able to give away or sell your creations to friends and family (or strangers at a farmer’s market or Etsy shop). Having another person be happy as a result of something you learned how to do is incredibly rewarding in ways that an obscure collection may not be. It can be quite a downer to have others fail to understand what’s so interesting about your collection and even painful if they tell you they think it’s a waste of time and money. Of course, ultimately this reward/consequence of a hobby depends greatly on your relationships to other people and how much you care (or not) what they think.
So well said. It reminds of story about Actor Jackie Chan, in one of his interview he shows his collection of tea cup, he had accumulated so many tea cups of all variety that filled his entire room. And now he had grown out of that hobby he didn’t know what to do with those tea cups.
