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.
One more for “avoids collecting hobbies”. I can’t think of a single collectible thing that has held my interest my entire life, I have no reason to think anything out there would hold it going forward for the rest of my life.
I drop hobbies when they stop being fun, for whatever reason. Sometimes I get bored with it, sometimes my goal was only ever to dabble in it to try it out, sometimes it’s closely associated with certain people and those people are no longer involved, sometimes I move and a previous hobby doesn’t work as well in my new location.
I collect bottle openers from breweries I’ve been to. It’s less about the thing and more about the going places. The collection is nice, but it could disappear in an instant and I wouldn’t really care since I still got to go to all those places and try their beer.
I’m more of a T-shirt/sticker person. If I like the brewery I’ll get a shirt (so long as they’re not grossly overpriced) but will always try to get a sticker…again of they’re not grossly overpriced. The only place that charged more than $2 for a sticker has terrible beer.
My big cooler is almost completely covered and it almost seems like half my shirts are from breweries.
Nice! I have a weird mental block to using stickers. “If I use it, then I won’t have it when I want to put it somewhere else.”
I like the paddle bottle openers. They are easy and quick to use and don’t take up much space at all by the bar.
I was always kinda the same way with those stickers. I’ve always had a worry in the back of my head that if I like the sticker I’d be mad if it didn’t stick or whatever I put it on I’d have to throw away.