Recently, it has come to my attention that my nerd room of doom has not been arranged or straightened in a year or more. Longboxes are everywhere, and some of my favorite display items are stacked in the corner in a jumble of boxes, never tasting the light of day. Though most of it is packed well or in protective storage containers, I still wonder how the high-end collectors find the time and energy to organize and display their collections. Granted, it’s a little different bagging and boarding your comics when you’ve just spent a six hour shift working at doing the same, but the amount of care and effort shown by some collector’s is nothing short of astonishing.
The MS-QOTD (pronounced “aye-kee-yah”) isn’t afraid to admit that they’re toys, asking:
How much time do you end up devoting to maintaining and managing your hobby?
(For the digital comics reader, would the equivalent be defragmenting your hard drive?)
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My room is in shambles. Lately, it has been “where do I put this pile of stuff?” rather than, “How am I going to organize and make this a room to shoot a web series for Major Spoilers in?” I really need to find someone I can pay minimum wage, whom I can trust, and let them loose in the room to make it shine.
Seeing as how I just spent the past three hours hauling massive storage boxes down two flights of stairs into a crawlspace & still have a big “to read” pile, I’d say too damn much. But I’m just tired & cranky right now.
Living somewhere where trades and digital are all I can buy, the answer was basically zero. Then I read the question and have spent half an hour trying to find my copy of No Man’s Land Vol. 4. So thanks for that.
I’ve come to realize I just have way too much stuff and it pained me to come to the decision, but I decided to start getting rid of a lot of it. Just no use for a lot of it, and my hobbies have moved on. I still love me the comic books and stuff, just not as much. I’ve started to go digital, less clutter, much easier to keep up with on flash drives and external hard drives.
After multiple moves, my collection became more akin to exercise equipment and I sold all of my long boxes. That solved the need to bag/board etc. Now I stick mainly to trades which are easy to stick on a book shelf. Other than that I have only a few choice items and that is it. I have always been more interested in a good story above all else so parting with the chotchkes that can clutter a space was no biggie.
I realized a long time ago that I suck at housework. A lot. So now while I love my hobbies, I keep it to a 1-bookshelf maximum and put myself on moratorium until I can clear space on the shelf. This might be influenced by moving many many times. I’m moving for the second time this year in a couple weeks. I usually try to find someone who wants my Tyranid army or that cool set of 4 random single issue comic books, and keep my trades and tabletop books sacred. It can be hard, but in the end, it’s easier than packing all that cr*p around the country.
I rearrange the figures and other collectibles on my shelves at least twice a month. And I spend a few hours a week working on costumes, more if I’m feeling okay and have the materials. But in my case, the problem isn’t time (I’m disabled and have plenty of free time), the first problem is the money or means to get things. Where I used to get a few new figures and comics every payday, now I end up only getting things for birthday, christmas and the occasional payment for babysitting. The second problem is not being too loopy from my painkillers and other meds. I don’t even like replacing the board and bag of old comics if I’m too loopy for fear I’ll damage it somehow (not that I have too many valuable old comics, but those I do I like to keep well preserved) and I definitely don’t risk dropping any of my figures or collectibles while in the same state.
(For the digital comics reader, would the equivalent be defragmenting your hard drive?)
I guess I count as a “digital reader”, but I don’t need to defragment my hard-drive manually — like the smartphone crowd says, “There’s an app for that”. (I like SmartDefrag, for those who were curious or would like to automate their own defragging.) I do, however, need to sometimes reorganize my “Comics” folder, but Cut-And-Pasting isn’t too arduous. I’ve also long-ago learned that having “stuff” means “dusting/cleaning/etceteraing”, so I live a pretty sparse collector-life. In short, “what I’mma do with all that junk” is “not collect a bunch of things in the first place”.
When I was a little-wyntermute, I had a pin & button (not sewing pins & buttons, but like “Sports Team”/”Olympic Pins” and the like) collection, and a Matchbox cars collection, and a huge stack of comic books, and … my mom used to have to nag me to tidy them up. I guess it’s my buddhist-type personality, but I find that “having stuff” just creates stress and housework, so I collect “memories” instead of “physical nicknacks.” If I were rich enough to hire maids I might have a room for such things, but otherwise I just try not to catch “collectoritis”. (But this isn’t an attempt at saying “I’m better than you!”; merely “different”, despite the fact that I share the love of comics that seems to pervade this place.) ^_^
That is a lot like a friend of mine. She has all of two real collectibles (both are those pricey variant mini-statue things) but she’s probably twice the geek of anyone else I know in real life.