He's got my vote

I know that there's a couple of websites out there that do awards for various things, including blog of the year, at the end of each year. And I seem to recall that right around the time I started blogging myself, that there was a blog, or blogs, that gave out individual awards, but I don't think I ever actually saw any of those results, and have never heard anyone even mention winning one of those categories.

I'm not too keen on the idea of crowning any particular blog, "The Blog of the Year", or best blog, or whatever you want to call it. There are an awful lot of great blogs, most of which are unique in their own way, which is of course what makes them so great. I would argue that no blog is "better" than another, as that's very subjective, and plays on favoritism for my liking. By saying a blog is the "best", also makes me think that the voter is implying that if they could only read one blog, it would be that "best" blog. How one dimensional of you! If I could only read one blog, I'd choose no blog. I need variety. I need personalities, lots of personalities! I need multiple viewpoints. I'm not looking to replicate the China experience, where we have just one state sponsored blog, and you shouldn't be either. Being involved with the blogs (as a "writer" or reader) is great because you become part of a community, not an individual.

Now don't get me wrong, I may be opposed to saying that any one blog is "the blog of the year", but that doesn't mean that I'm opposed to awards in general, on the contrary, I actually really like the idea of handing out individual awards. Not only does it give a number of people a chance to "win" something, but more importantly, it recognizes many blogs, as well as their owners. Anyone is capable of writing an awesome post, or creating a memorable series, so why shouldn't they be recognized with a "Post of the Year" or "Series of the Year" award? If someone was willing to undertake such an affair, and put together some sort of Blogger awards (I don't think that anyone is going to volunteer to do so though), any number of categories could be created, from the silly to the serious, but at least when all was said and done, many people would end up being celebrated, not just one.

I'm sure a few of you might be wondering where I'm going with all of this, so let me tell you.

I started thinking about this subject while looking through my most recent purchase, which just so happens to have been 167 cards from the BASEBALLCARDSTORE.CA, a site that pretty much everyone involved with the blogs only knows about because of Trevor, from the Bump and Run Football Card Blog. He was the first to purchase from them, as well as the first to post about them, which has led to a countless number of other bloggers, and blog readers, to buy from them as well. So with that in mind, I couldn't help but think that if we were giving out awards, Trevor would surely be a shoo-in for "Assist of the Year", I know he'd have my vote. In a year where card shows have been scarce, card shops have been shuttered, COMC has been a hot mess, and eBay has devolved into a radioactive dumpster fire; the baseballcardstore has been a beacon of light for card collectors, and a lot of us have Trevor to thank for that beacon. [I'm thinking that the owners of the site should be compensating Trevor in some way as well, at least give him a discount, or free shipping, something!]

I fully admit to not being overly impressed on my first trip to the site after Trevor's initial post, and had much difficulty with the search feature. I found a couple of cards, but not enough to warrant an order. I was happy to celebrate everyone else's purchases, but had pretty much given up hope of me ever buying anything from them. That was until a few weeks back, when I decided to try and give the site another go. I ended up having less difficulty using their search feature, and started finding cards, lots of cards!

Given how many problems I've had in buying from places where you can't see the cards (I'm looking at you, Sportlots), I was a little hesitant to buy anything lest the cards ended up being in terrible condition. Thankfully I know of a fellow who I could trust to give me an honest answer about such things, so I sent off a quick email to Chris, who promptly vouched for the site, and the overall condition of their cards -- which was all I needed to start buying!

They've got a new layaway feature, which is really nice, it's basically like COMC, where you can just buy a bunch of crap, have them hold it, rinse and repeat, and then have all of your stuff shipped together when your ready. I did this over about a week, which gave me plenty of time to find a lot of really need things. Things like Panini stickers from '94 and '96, neither of which I had ever seen before, as I had stopped buying stickers by that point.

If you're buying from a site based out of Canada, it only makes sense to get some O-Pee-Chee (you'll have to trust me on the '91).

Having finished with my year long sort a few months ago, and finding that I'm mostly interested in only player collecting at this point, I pretty much just focused on certain players for the first purchase. The only problem I had was that I had finished sorting the baseball keepers first, so all of those binders and boxes are at the bottom of the card piles, and I've since unpacked a number of toy boxes, the contents of which are mostly piled up in front of said said binders and boxes, which has made them almost impossible to get to. So I had to go off of memory for the most part, which didn't work out so well, because I couldn't remember sh*t. I did the best I could, but still ended up with a lot less baseball than I had planned.

Is it just me, or do these two cards look really good side-by-side?

I told myself that I wasn't going spend more than $20 on this first order, I ended up spending $21.70 overall, which I guess is close enough.

I also told myself that I wasn't going to scan everything, and subject all of you to multiple posts worth of stuff... that didn't work out either! Seeing as how this was my largest card purchase of the year (strange year), and unless I hit up a show sometime soon (they start back up next month), may end up being my largest card purchase of the year, so you're just gonna have to indulge me in couple of "look what I got" posts (although this ones getting pretty wordy for a "look" post). Although for the record, I didn't scan everything for the coming basketball and football posts, just most of it :)

Why is it that sometimes Metal scans really well, and other times it doesn't? And I couldn't get it to show up very well, but the UD Boone is one of those gold hologram ones, which if I remember from the blogs correctly, were exclusive to the box sets. This site seems to have introduced the existence of these to a lot of people, myself included.

I wasn't collecting cards when UD Vintage came out, which is probably a good thing, because as far as the throwback sets go, it may be one of the weaker entries. The extreme closeup of this oft used Lou Boudreau photo didn't help their cause, it's an ugly card, but it's a Lou that I didn't have, and it was only a dime, so...

It's a stretch to refer to this as a Junior card, but that's what the site called it, and that's what I'll call it. I suspect that pretty much all of the Junior cards have been gotten by this point, provided of course they ever had any to begin with.

And that does it for the baseball portion of the order, like I said, I didn't get very far on that front. Since were already here, and I've got a little bit of time to kill, I might as well tuck a couple of non-sport cards in here at the end, minus the ALF sticker that led off the last post (I wish that they would've had more of those).

I decided sometime last year that I wanted to start a few non-sport "player" collections, since Venom and Carnage are two of my favorite comic baddies of all time (Carnage might be my absolute favorite), they seemed like obvious choices to collect. As usual though, I picked the worst possible time to do so, as it was just a few months later that the announcement was made that Carnage would appear in the Venom sequel, and people doing what they do, started buying all the Carnage cards in sight. Apparently those same people did this when the first Venom film came out, and even though it's almost universally disliked, they haven't slowed down much with their buying.

I put together the Marvel Universe series 2 set (technically speaking it's the sixth series, as most people seem to ignore the first four series' that started in 1987) back in 1991 when it was released. At one time I had almost a couple more sets of duplicates, but have given away pretty much all of them over the years, so when it came time to this Venom collection, the only one I had left was in my set, and I wasn't about to pull it out -- thankfully the site took care of my dilemma.

I used some of my birthday money to buy a box of Marvel Universe series 3 back in '92, and have had a complete set since then. And just like the previous series, had lots of duplicates, but have given them all away.

Here's one for the liars, drunks, and loonies binder; aka the Barrymore family binder. I don't really have such a binder, but am now intrigued by the idea. I have no affinity for Batman Forever, but do like this card. Shout out to Spyda-Man, if he hadn't shown a few of the BF holograms from his order, I would've never thought to check the site for them (or any other holograms).

And finally, the only card that I've ever wanted from the Fangoria set, but have never been able to find cheap. Thanks go out to dayf for this one, like the Barrymore hologram above, I would've never thought to check for this had the Cardboard Junkie not mentioned it while recapping his purchase from the site. For the record too, outside of the first couple of issues, Fangoria is my least favorite monster magazine, Rue Morgue is high up on that list too, but at least Rue has done a few interesting history-based articles over the years, Fangoria is just blood and guts, with a heavy emphasis on the guts.

If you're still here, I'd like to mention that I'll be doing a "thing" here on the blog a week from today, since it'll be a Friday, you should probably be able to guess what kind of "thing" it's going to be, although this "thing" will be a tad different from previous similar "things". So if you like "things", you might want to try and be here around 5:30pm (Central Time) next Friday.

And as far as the rest of this baseballcardstore stuff goes, I'm going to try and have the basketball portion up on Sunday, and then close it out with the football some time next week. Neither sport is very popular with blog readers, so it'll be interesting to me to see which one does better, I'm thinking that the football will, but I could be wrong.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

Making it up as I go

Is it possible for the internet to be overcrowded?

I don't know if it is actually possible or not, but it sure feels like it as of late.

From what I've been able to gather, Netflix and Twitter are king right now. Oh, and something called Tik-Tok(?) too. I don't know what that is, and I don't care enough to look it up, but it keeps getting mentioned all over the place. I get that everyone is cooped up a the moment, mostly against their will, but it would be nice to think that some folks might be using all of this new found free time a little more constructively, you know, turn all of this negative virus business into something positive? I realize that this just crazy talk though, as the majority of people seem to be quite content with their current schedule of whining into the ether while watching television all day... it's much easier than trying to do something creative!

As for me, I don't do the Netflix, and am of the opinion that complaining about things on Twitter serves absolutely no purpose, so I'm free to do plenty of other things. I hate to say it, and feel free to criticize me for saying it, but I think that old 'Rona showing up has actually been a good thing for me, at least as far as how I spend my free time goes [note: hearing of all the suffering that has occurred, and is still occurring, around the world, most certainly isn't a good thing for me, or anyone else]. I've been able to spend even more time outside, although cleaning up storm damage isn't exactly how I had planned to spend my spring (and most likely part of the summer too), but it does provide plenty of exercise, so I can't complain too much.

I've been spending most of my evenings doing one of three things - or more often than not, doing a little bit of each - sorting cards, writing, and drawing. I've been sorting cards off and on for over a year now, so that's nothing new, but I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which has inspired me to do a little more each night, so that I might be able to get done a bit sooner (more on this below). As for the writing, I've had a few story ideas rattling around in my head for a while now, and have recently decided to finally try and put one of them down on paper. I find myself needing some research material from the library, but seeing as how they're currently closed, I'll obviously just have to work around that until they open back up. I don't expect anything to come from all of this, especially since the writing itself is probably, umm, less than good, however I won't have to think about this particular story anymore, which will hopefully free up some space in this old brain of mine. Drawing is another thing that I've been doing off and on for a couple of years now, I just can't seem to stick with it, despite really wanting to do so. I'm hoping that this'll be the time that it finally sticks, and if I'm really lucky, I'll start feeling comfortable enough to show some stuff on here.

The best part of all of this though, is that my time on the interwebz has been drastically reduced, I think I've averaged around thirty minutes a day over the last couple of weeks, and couldn't be happier about it! The only bad thing to come from this has been that I haven't been keeping up with the blogs, and even worse, I've unintentionally become "only comments on free stuff posts" guy. And of course I haven't been doing much on here either, I managed to grind out four whole posts last month, and am on target for maybe five or six this month. It's a good thing that everyone else seems to be picking up the slack, as it makes it easier to fade into the background.

This is probably a good time to mention that I didn't really have any direction in mind as far as this post goes, so... here's a couple of random things and then I'll bounce:

I don't remember exactly when it was, but sometime a little over a month ago, I thought that it might be fun to do a post about the progress that I was seeing from my year-long sort. I took a bunch a pictures, started the post, then realized that it wasn't going to make for much of a read, and subsequently scrapped it. I hate to think that I wasted all that time taking pictures for nothing though, so I'm gonna squeeze a few into this post and call it good.

At the time that the photos were taken, I had thought that I had finished up with the baseball side of things, and was incredibly proud of myself for being able to fit all of my keepers into one two-row shoebox (and still have some extra space), after all that was the point of this big sort, to try and whittle everything down to the things that were the most important to me. The only thing that wasn't in the box were the Ichiro and Junior collections (which were still in a binder), and the binders full of random stuff that's separated by team. Unfortunately for me, I had forgotten about the two binders of old-timer sets (Pacific Legends, Fleer Greats, SP Cuts, etc.), and by the time I got done with those, I had three more stacks, a few more names to add the collecting list, and not enough room in my wonderful little shoebox. As you'll see in a second, all of my other boxes are currently being occupied, and with everywhere being closed currently, I had to get creative and use an actual shoebox for those three extra stacks (sorry, no picture).

Here's a more current look at my football box, save for Eric Dickerson (still in binder), and two binders of misc. stuff (sorted by team). I'm not quite done with the football yet, I got sidetracked last week and started working on non-sport (no picture yet) stuff, which is going really quick. This box is going to have to be reorganized at some point, as the original plan was to put the old-timers on the left, and keep the newer guys on the right, but it got all screwy at some point, and I just didn't feel like going back and fixing it.

I've always been a binder guy, so it's been a little weird putting stuff in boxes like this, but I thought it would be easier to have everything together when I go to start making lists. I'm kind of enjoying the space that's been freed up by emptying so many binders though, so while a lot of this will probably end back up in binders at some point, I think I might hold off for a bit, and enjoy my new found extra space.

And here's what's left to do, binder wise. 75% of this probably basketball, with the rest being abandoned sets that need to find a new home. I've been a little hesitant to start the basketball portion of the sort, because I still don't know what I want to do about some of the nearly completed sets from the 70's. Heck, I don't even know what I want to do with some of the completed 70's sets. Like a lot of collectors, I don't ever go back and look through completed sets, and in recent years, have developed the mindset of why have it, if I never look at it? Part of me wants to just pull out the players that I want to collect, and sell the rest. The other part of me says to keep the completed sets, finish the nearly completed sets, and just pull out the players that I want to collect and keep the rest of the sets separate -- that way if anything ever happens to me, the sets can be put back together and sold. This seems like the smart way to go, I just don't know if I want to have a bunch of partial sets sitting around taking up space, when I only really care about the cards of 15-20 guys from those sets anymore.

The rest of the basketball here is already separated by player (I did that last summer), but I haven't been to crazy about all of the space that those binders are taking up, and if I continue to go this route, I'm going to have to start at least three more binders just finish putting away the rest of the basketball cards that I have stacked all over the place.

Oh, and I've mentioned my binders of miscellany twice in this post, so I might as well provide an update on those as well. Before last week I had two binders going for each of the three sports, which wasn't too bad, but I decided to take a look through them and see if there was anything that I could live without, apparently there was, because by the time I got done I only had one binder for each of the three sports. A lot of that junk, er... I mean... quality cardboard, will end up being tossed into the Free Stuff Friday mix, so stay tuned for that. Speaking of Free Stuff Friday, I'm getting way too many cards for my once a month giveaways, so I'm thinking that I'm gonna take Brian, and now Chris', lead, and start doing them on a weekly basis, let people build stacks, then ship at the end of the month. I still have some stuff that I want to finish up first, so I'll wait until May to start doing that.

I've been able to weed out four full monster boxes worth of stuff (I know, there's only three in the picture), mostly abandoned set builds, which feels really good, and seeing them makes all of this sorting seem like it was worth it. The cards on top of the boxes are mostly keepers BTW, I just haven't put them in their respective boxes yet.

Phew... that was a tad more sorting talk than I had planned! I guess this is what happens when I go a week in-between posts. A few more things, and then I'll bounce... I swear it this time!

I hit up the post office last Wednesday and got all but three of people's claims from the last Free Stuff Friday sent out, and the other three will hopefully go out this week (I ran out of stamps). I've already heard from a couple of people who got their stuff, so if anyone hasn't received theirs yet, I would imagine that your stuff will arrive sometime in the next couple of days.

Wednesday was also grocery shopping day, which here usually means going to the Walmart. It's been a few weeks since I've looked at anything that wasn't food related, so I decided to go check out the discount DVD/Blu-Ray bins, and was quite surprised to see this sitting on top of the $5 bin...

This has been on my to get list for three years now, but has been a bit out of my price range. I think the last time I looked it up was around Christmas, and it was still in the $20 range, so five bucks was too good of a deal to pass on. I guess I should point out too for those that don't know, or don't care, this was the last Japanese made Godzilla to come out. I could give two sh*ts about the terrible Godzilla movies that Hollywood keeps making, but I still get all squishy inside for the Japanese Godzilla pictures.

I don't think I'll enter it, mostly because I think he might have trouble finding something for me if I were to win, but I did want to mention that Adam has returned to blogging, and is currently running a very generous contest. It looks like it's pretty easy to enter, and you still have a couple of days to get in on it, so head on over and get yourself signed up, provided that you haven't already done so of course.

I see too that, Matt, has started up another new blog, so you should go check that out as well. I haven't read any of the posts yet, but it looks like he's doing his usual and posting on a near daily basis, so no one can say that he's not doing his part to try and take your mind off of all of the negativeness out there. Hopefully I can catch up on this blog later in the week :)

I think that covers just about everything. And I'm pretty sure that I've exceeded my recent thirty minutes of internetting per day average here tonight (Sunday), but we're currently under yet another severe thunderstorms watch/flash flood watch/high wind watch/tornado watch, so I've had a bit of extra time to ramble this evening... aren't you lucky!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

Some non-card randomness

This past Saturday was a card show day, and quite a successful one at that, but before I start diving into all that goodness, I've got a few recent non-card finds that I wanted to share with everyone.

I have been on a real ALF kick as of late, which has also included going back and watching all of the ALF Tales cartoon series, which by the way, is still quite enjoyable. Not surprisingly, this has caused me to seek out some ALF stuff that I don't already have, including these four 1990 Wendy's ALF Tales figures. There are six in the set, but these four were under $7 (with free shipping) on eBay, which seemed like too good of a deal to pass up. At some point I will be trying to find the other two, but for the moment, it's not among my highest priorities.

I found this cool SpongeBob golf ball in spot (the side of the road) that was no where near a golf course. I had no idea they made such things, which might be why I've been so enamored with it. I did already show it on the Twitter, but since it wasn't some of kind anti-Trump message, or pertaining to baseball, I don't really know if anyone saw it or not.

My mom found this Webstor at an antique shop in Knoxville for, in her own words, "a price that was too good to pass up"... so I'm guessing that he wasn't more than two dollars. He's missing his grappling hook and rifle, but on the flip side, he's got virtually no paint loss, and is a serious upgrade to my childhood figure. An excellent addition to my recently renewed MOTU collection!

I found this jar (make-up?) in the creek last week, it had been there for a really long time, but I think it still cleaned up pretty good. I absolutely love finding stuff, I always have, so if anyone's wondering why this jar is being shown, well, now you know. In fact, once I decided to give this blogging thing a try, my first thought was to do a blog of nothing but the interesting stuff I find... aka interesting junk that people discard along side the road, in the woods, etc. Realizing that no one would probably read such a blog, I then thought about doing a stamp blog, but you have to be kind of smart to do such a blog, so that ruled me out. I then settled on sports cards, which now in the last year or so has morphed into a blog about all of my interests, and one of those just happens to be finding other people's interesting castoffs/litter.

For nobody but me, here is the bottom. The best part about finding interesting discards, is trying to find a way to put it to use. As of right now though, I have no idea what I'm going to be using it for, but I'll come with something :)

Last, but certainly not least, is this Godzilla bust bank made by Diamond Select Toys.

This sculpt is based on the 1989 version of Godzilla, which basically just means that it's the Godzilla from Godzilla vs. Biollante.

I have been watching this bank on Amazon for awhile now, but in typical Amazon fashion, the price keeps fluctuating, and it always seems to be on the higher side when it comes time for me to be ordering something from the site... that was at least until last week when the price was at the lowest I had ever seen it, so I bought it, as well as two other bust banks. Amazon broke the order in to two shipments, so that's why you're only seeing the Godzilla.

Now that that stuff has been shown, I can do a couple of card show posts, which for my benefit, will be broken in to a number of smaller posts featuring items grouped together by common themes.


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