Videogames

Books have always been rough for me, I need them to grab me instantly, cant bruteforce anymore, either way, my imagination is fried, so I swapped to comics, did junkfood reading webtoons/manhua,etc. for a bit, binged a ton of stuff, eventually wanted more, started reading comics again and this hobby has stuck for over a year, the visuals help me get into stuff I otherwise wouldn't read even if it's super wordy.

I haven't had a book phase since I started using tiktok, I blame that app. I used to binge read some high fantasy series once a year for at least a month, I miss the brain tingly feeling of stuff coming together, movies and tv shows give it rarely, some books sent electricty down my spine and I felt like I was physically on molly just rolling tits as stuff came together, like hiw ppl describe asmr, but since tiktok I just zone out instead of getting in to books, really want to read the most recent stormlight and gentleman bastards (if that releaed havent checked)

Gaming.

I'm just shit at it now. I used to love FPS games, now I can barely hit anyone let alone get any kills.

I two primary hobbies are music and basketball. I’m still making music and not intending to stop anytime soon. But I don’t think my body can do basketball anymore, especially when I go for pick up games and everyone is younger, faster, and stronger than me. Not to mention people are competitive and I don’t fit in as someone who just wants to play casually for exercise.

I’ve been trying to find a steady group of people to play with who are looking for the same thing, but have been unsuccessful so far. I might have to hang it up pretty soon.

I lost books sometime in the aughts. I miss them but its just to easy to do other things. MMO's are another. That is sorta the reverse in that they suck up to much time and there are personal reasons I needed to drop them. Going to cons also fell out about the same time as reading and its fun to hang with fen folk. Ill say along with cons just any in person nerd thing. free thought groups, makerspaces. they are all sorta part of the same thing I think which is essentially just hanging with nerds and geeks.

Comics.

I collected when I was a kid for a few years. That was probably 1990-1993. Lost interest after a while.

I came back to the hobby for brief periods in 2013 and 2017, picking up a few of the Bronze Age key books that I wanted when I was a lot younger. Now I was older and had the money to buy those books.

In the covid years there was a comic-boom, and I was caught up in that. There were a lot of things happening within the hobby and a lot of people making YouTube content around it.

The problem with getting too involved with comics is that they take up too much fucking space. Right now, I have around 4500 books in the collection. That number needs to come down to like 1000.

I’ve been working on a full run of the original X-Men series. I have 21 books to go until I’ve completed the 545 book run. I do still intend to obtain the remaining 21 books; but there’s no immediate plans for buying any old books that aren’t X-Men. I’ll keep those. There’s probably around 400 or so other books that I’d like to hold on to, and that’s how I’ve arrived at my 1000#. I want to get rid of pretty much 2/3 of the entire collection at this point. It just takes up too much space. I still buy new books too, but am finding it less enjoyable (relative to other options) since I’ve moved to a different state. There’s a lot more outdoors stuff for me to do in the new state, but the LCS is also a longer drive now.

Selling them is truly a major pain in the ass too. eBay has a limit of 250 free listings per month. I don’t want to exceed that, otherwise I spend $0.35 per listing, even if the (average buy it now price is $4) listing doesn’t sell. Whatnot is an alternative to eBay, but that really requires actively getting in camera and trying to sell stuff to people. That’s a huge time expense. There’s also other places like hipcomic that auction books but I have no interest in selling there. When I was more buying (rather than trying to sell) those sites always seemed to be overpriced, and so I stopped going. I imagine I’m not alone in that experience. I speculate they have low traffic, and so the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Wrapping up, yes… I’m falling out of this hobby but more so because I’m almost done with the original goal; but the current state of my coexistence with the beast of collecting is causing me a combination of both anxiety and resentment. The reality is that I’ll have to somehow, someway, spend a lot of time getting rid of these 3500 or so books without being totally ripped off in the process. Getting rid of them doesn’t sound fun at all. Dealing with people is annoying. I don’t enjoy haggling. I don’t enjoy taking 1000s of pictures of comics with my phone. I don’t enjoy salesmanship in any way, shape or form.

What started as a fun “chase that goal,” type hobby evolved into a “this is taking up a ton of space, and you now need to either pretend to be someone you’re not for a long time to get rid of them properly, throw them in the trash, or just get totally fucked over by selling them in bulk direct to some other reseller” type deal. No one tells you that when you get into comics.

Art. I used to do all kinds of art. Now mostly I do music instead.

Cooking.

I love to cook but my wife hates my food.

Tbh, most of my old hobbies I thought I had lost interest in came flooding back once I started running and exercising and eating better. It's actually been months now since I last worked out. I'm in the process of writing a story, and I love it. So....none, with a new one.