I find that most people in my life have at least one “thing” they are collecting. It is often an insight into their personality and it is fun to hear people talk about something they are passionate about.
Record collector here too. I can tell you exactly when I started, and it was when I saw a copy of Beggar’s Banquet by the Rolling Stones for 50p in a charity shop. Didn’t even have a record player at the time. Now I’ve got 471 records and counting and spend far too much money on the hobby.
I have a lot of small bottles and vials waiting to be filled. It started decades ago when I found a quaint little glass tube with a stopper in an antique shop at my favorite beach town and thought it’d be nice to take home some sand from my favorite spot, thereafter becoming a tradition for subsequent visits. Now I pick one up whenever I see one to have a cache available for any future adventures.
It’s super easy to just collect then when you see them (even at craft stores and plant shops) and then it ends up kinda encouraging you to think up adventures so you can fill them.
I’ve got some with sand, dirt, ocean/lake water, gravel, some with just air (captured a cloud/fog while high atop a mountain), tears, paper, burnt campfire wood, etc.
My secret sauce is that I don’t label them so I have to try to call up the origin story in memory and I get an excuse to tell a tale whenever someone asks me about one.
As a kid, we were so poor, it was scary. I remember living in a car, having to choose between going hungry or eating food that was past its prime, and learning Santa wasn’t real too young (I couldn’t understand why my friends got expensive dream gifts… I thought I had been good)
After going through all that and my mom overdosing, I started collecting things that would accumulate value or were an investment. Comic books and figurines are my go to, but I’ve also got machines for creating cosplays (as that’s my career now). I won’t buy anything that I can’t pawn off in an emergency to survive, or use it to make money. I really should have been collecting coins/gold/silver, but I picked what was fun.
Also, shoutout to my elementary school’s lunch lady, who noticed a tiny, thin girl using the free lunch program, and offered her seconds, after everyone else had been served. I don’t think she knows how much she touched my life.
I’ve gotten into selfhosting lately, and my newest obsession is setting up a browser based emulator that I can access from anywhere and basically play 3 games - contra, balloon fight, and caddilacs & dinosaurs
Edit - I mean play legally backed up copies of these games :)
I thrift clothes! On top of that, I also curate digital media, like ebooks and music, for personal use. It’s nice to curate and cull that which you don’t like.
I collect ttrpgs! I love reading how mechanics work together and I’ve never found value in collecting things I don’t use, so ttrpgs it is. Plus there are some really wild ones out there that are fun to look at. It started with 3.5/Pathfinder but eventually I branched out to a couple other games that I like to play. I spend the most effort on my Car Wars collection, think I’m going to try getting a complete set of ADQ on that front next.
My single prized book so far though is a copy of HōL’s supplement buttery wholesomeness. Specifically the second printing of it with the cover that’s written like BUTTery HOLsomeness which ended up being so hard to track down over like 5 years that I started to question if it even had a physical printing or if it was just in PDF form. Finally found the thing though last year
I personally love Paranoia. It is very much a comedy game but it can be played with a serious take with the right work. Plus it is just a fun read even if you don’t play it.
Rifts is pretty baller conceptually but I don’t have first hand experience playing it.
GURPS has a Car Wars crossover making it objectively one of the best games, can be played with any level of tech, and has buckets of supplements.
The Burning Wheel is more fantasy but the book is basically a philosophy of play which could be adapted to lots of things, and the same author wrote Burning Empires which is more scifi but I haven’t acquired that one so can’t give first hand info on it either.
Can’t forget Car Wars. It is scifi though it is a mix of ttrpg and strategy/board. If you want to drive a car off a cliff while dropping mines on a helicopter as you go by and have your robot gunner leaning out the window shooting lasers at a tank it is the way to go.
Finally I’ll pitch HōL because the game is just so unhinged. It is all hand written and scanned, it’s edgy and crass, and is a great parody of roleplaying games. It’s engaging and fun to read with great art but realistically quite difficult to functionally play because the rules are intentionally a mess. The Buttery Wholesomeness supplement added character creation rules which don’t exist in the base game because it is a mess.
I’ve also got all 3 books for Monsters of Murka, limited covers, signed by several of the people who worked on it. I think my copies of Thirsty Sword Lesbians and Mork Borg are on other shelves. Finally, an unopened box set for Boat Wars which I’ll be opening sometime soon so I can pretend I lived in the 80s and just came home with a box from the lgs.
I wouldn’t call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I’ve been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I’d still have my games.
Ha, it’s not, although I do have it (two versions actually, one where it’s the b-side of Your Love)
Favourite record is a tough one. Impossible maybe. One I finally got a couple of weeks ago, that I’ve wanted for ages, is Go by Moby. Probably still not my favourite, but I was delighted to get it :-)
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