When you’re paying $92.45 for a video game in a fancy collectors’ package, your expectations probably run pretty high. It’s a stupid amount to pay for a non-essential item, but…
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The Black Diamond, VHS Grading, and How You’re Being Scammed
If you watch enough episodes of Pawn Stars or Antiques Roadshow, you may start to dream about finding something in your attic that’s worth a million bucks. And that’s a lovely thought…
Eagles and Lasers : Fleer’s Robot Wars Trading Cards
It’s 1985. Transformers have just appeared in the US, and The Transformers : The Movie isn’t due out for another year. GoBots have already been around for a couple of years,…
Vintage Valentines : Crash Test Crushes
As a nervous kid, the annual gut-pit that was Elementary school Valentines Day was just a step above Field Day in terms of sleepless nights created. It was, for the…
Unpopular Ideas : DC Comics’ Bloodlines
It’s May 1993. Superman is dead as of Superman #75 (November 1992), and Batman’s iconic Knightfall arc has just started; two months later he’d have his back broken in Batman #497…
Scratch ‘n’ Slay : Battle Cards by Steve Jackson
Fantasy-themed trading cards are nothing new, but trading card games weren’t really a thing until 1993. There were a few early outliers and TCG-like games, but some argue that the…
Yesterday’s Enterprise – 12 Most Wanted Star Trek : The Next Generation Action Figures That Never Were
Star Trek nerds have found themselves in the middle of the fourth age of Trek, and that’s a pretty cool thing, whether or not you like what Discovery, Prodigy and Picard…
Dollar Bins of the Past and Future : X-Men 2099 #1-10
Revisiting the first ten issues of X-Men 2099, a cyberpunk dorktopia.
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 10
It’s not really known how many “new to you” albums the average music consumer listens to in a year, though the r/music fans on Reddit seem to have numbers that…
Bootleg Retro Gaming : Five More Terrible Mistakes
The burning trashfire that is bootleg sub-$20 bootleg game consoles never ends. And with free shipping from China, why should it end? Almost a dozen crap consoles into the exploration…
Golden Age Glory : The Blue Beetle vs. The Phantom
Golden Age comics are hit or miss. As some of the first comics ever created, they form the foundation of all subsequent comics, so there’s a lot of foundational work…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 9
There weren’t really revelations in records 81 through 90, but there were a few uncatalogued diversions into a couple of Harry Belafonte records, one Tower of Power, and one Gentle…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 8
There had to be a rough patch in here eventually. A majority of the next ten records were a disappointment, having made the terrible mistake of picking up a patch…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 7
More than anything else, probably, ‘Quarantainment’ is a series about being stuck in an apartment with a giant pile of things. How to co-habitate with things, how to let go…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 6
I’m not sure how to mentally or emotionally process listening to 50 new records over the course of two months, but it feels like I’ve barely scraped the surface of…
Bootleg Gaming : The Secrets of the Family Pocket Retro Handheld
When you break the $20 barrier or bootleg handheld consoles, you have two specific expectations : real games, and lots of them. The Family Pocket, aka FC 3000, aka Empire…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 5
When you’re 40 albums into thoughtfully sorting a collection of hundreds, it’s tempting to stop being meticulous and giving every album a few moments of your time. You start to…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 4
When you have an accidental record collection that reaches numbers you’ve given up on counting, it’s time to slim down. Take all of the audio that’s ever been released on…
American Sentai : Weird 90s Games
The 1980s and 90s were a golden age of licensing cool kid junk. If it was a TV show for kids, you’d be able to find everything from video games…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 3
By the time you’re reading this episode of Quarantainment, our personal quarantine is at least partially over. We’ve been to a few Goodwills, eaten take-out lunch in the car, and…
Monsters Away : Who Were The Gazillions?
For a couple of years in the early 2000s, I ran a small Sunday morning AM radio show on an upstate NY college campus. I called it Delicious Radio, and…
Bootleg Gaming : The M3 Game Box & The Szdiier Windboy
It’s hard to break the under-$20 barrier when it comes to finding a miniature game console that doesn’t suck, and the more you play and collect, the more the sameness…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 2
Quarantine is slowly creeping to an end. The world may not be totally safe, but it’s finally safe enough for anyone who’s been vaccinated, and digging through record crates again…
Quarantainment : Digging Your Own Crates, Part 1
It’s been a long year of Covid. If there was even the smallest chance that close contact with other people could cause their illness or death, it was worth it…
