Baud Attitude

OK, really more like purging for fun and cutting my losses. 

I used to go to a really neat comic book shop in Culver City.  It was not your normal shop, where you have to look very hard to actually find the comics; it was a shop where the first thing you saw when you entered was a shelf of Archies and all-ages books, but it was also a shop where they ordered 50 copies of each new DC Archive because their clientele tended to be Serious Fans who didn’t mind spending $49.95 on hardcover comic book reprints.

It was the sort of shop that, when I went in on one of my first visits and asked if they had any back issues of Green Lantern, the owner smiled at me, handed me an issue #1 from 1960 and asked if that was far enough back - not in a smug way, but I think honestly just to see my face as I went through the stages of “what the hell am I holding, and dear god let me not drop it.”

My wife and I became regulars, and that was a bit of a problem because they were all too happy to drop a free copy of Previews in our bag and take the filled-out order forms from us on our next visit.

This was also right around the time when DC launched their DC direct line and there were all kinds of really neat toys being solicited.

Yeah, I think we can all see where this went.  By the time we moved out of Los Angeles, we had boxes and boxes of really neat toys.

We had also become quite hooked on collecting old videogames and video game systems from the 1980s, so we had boxes and boxes of Atari and Coleco and NES games.

Almost 4 years ago, I put on my to-do list: “Go through storage.  eBay toys and classic games.”

I managed to knock a big one of those off the list a couple summers ago - the classic video games.

That was, in retrospect, easy, mostly because I didn’t have to split them up and sell them individually.  I did one auction of something like 400 Atari 2600 cartridges, another one of 90 or so NES carts… so on and so forth, and when it was all over I shipped off some VERY heavy boxes and had a nice balance in the PayPal account.

The proceeds from those auctions, and a bunch of frequent flyer miles, were how I financed my 2007 Japan trip, by the way.  It was a LOT of old games.

But I still had boxes and boxes of toys - above and beyond the ones that we wanted to keep to display - to go through, and it’s harder to sell toys in big lots.  People tend to want specific characters, after all.

Right now, though, I have a couple of weeks between school terms, and while I’m still working full time, I don’t have any homework - I had the opportunity to finally get down to it.

Just setting up the auctions took four evenings - first, sorting through and deciding what was actually going to get sold and what was just going straight to Goodwill, then taking photos, writing descriptions, researching shipping, and on and on.

Tonight, though, I finally posted them, and - in a week - I will finally get to check that to-do item off my list, and hopefully I’ll have made back a small fraction of the original purchase prices. 

My wife and I have been going through a bit of a crazed organization phase recently, which has been helping enrich our local Ikea and Container Store to no end but which has also been making our apartment into a more livable cave.

This last weekend was a particularly good time for it; we had a couple of rooms that had become basically clutter heaps, but now have clear floors.  Many books shelved, loose papers filed,  homeless random crap given homes… We sat back after the weekend and felt like we’d DONE something.

Also I was in extreme pain for two days, but this morning I woke up and didn’t immediately go for Tylenol, so that’s an improvement.

On the other hand, there’s a point where you know you’ve gotten a LOT accomplished, and you think there’s probably a bunch to do, but you’ve gotten so many of the big tasks done that you look at your apartment and you think “Well, it’s a lot better, I don’t really see how it could be improved.”

Yesterday, I had the bright idea to wander the newly-organized apartment with a digital camera and just take photos of rooms, shelves, etc, from all sorts of angles and perspectives, and then browse through them when I was out of the apartment.

It’s amazing what you see when you look at your living space that way; you start saying things like “Wait, why do we have the boxes, carefully stored away, for the wireless router?  And why haven’t I given that 2MP digital camera, again with the carefully stored away box, to Goodwill yet?  And why do I have a bunch of gachapon figures tossed into a cardboard box, when at the same time I have a completely empty Milk & Cheese lunchbox stuck in a closet that should be on display and could co-incidentally hold all the loose gachapon figures?

I won’t go through the whole list of “Wait, why do I…?” because it had something like 30 entries.  None of them are particularly huge things,  which is how they escaped notice during what I’ll call the “macro” organization, but combined, taking care of them has already started to make a notable difference in clutter levels.

I can blame a lot of things on my anime habit.

For example, when I was first introduced to anime back in 1990 or so, I had a 13″ Thomson monitor, with a composite input, that I had a Sega Genesis hooked up to, and I had the audio out from the Genesis going through an all-in-one record player / dual cassette deck / AM/FM tuner unit.  I also had a CD player.  That was the extent of my home entertainment center.

I was content.

Then came the start of the anime habit, and I realized very quickly that borrowing or renting VCRs was just not going to cut it.  Also, I got some VERY odd looks at work when I’d use the TV/VCR in the break area.

So I bought my first VCR in the summer of 1991.  It was somewhere around $250 for a mono 4-head Samsung VCR, and it had problems playing back certain brands of tape, but damnit, it was mine and I could now watch anime in the privacy of my own home.

Of course, once I had a VCR, I started accumulating videotapes.

Then, a year or so later - after banks had been foolish enough to issue me credit cards - I bought a laserdisc player, and I started collecting laserdiscs.  This wasn’t the best idea ever, really, but they were the best thing going at the time.

The problems with having a whole lot of videotapes and LDs around are many.  They’re bulky.  They’re prone to degradation, they’re sensitive to heat and - for videotapes - magnetic fields, and it’s kind of annoying to have to keep players around for them.

So, several years ago, I set myself a goal of getting everything converted to, or replaced with, digital versions.

The majority of the tapes and LDs had been reissued in DVD format.  Those weren’t too bad.  Expensive, sure, but not too hard to replace.

The remaining analog media presented a bit of a problem.  Even getting as much as I could on DVD, I still had over 200 tapes and LDs that I couldn’t easily replace.

I bought an Adaptec VideOH! capture board, and very quickly learned some of the hassles of video capturing and format conversion and transcoding and compression and blah blah blah and on and on.

Honestly, it’s been a pain in the arse, and I’ve put it aside on several occasions because it’s been such a huge project to get through.

I finished converting the laserdiscs last August, but the tapes were just not getting done, so a few months ago, I decided I needed a way to set myself a deadline.

I get cold very easily, so I took all the remaining videotapes and stacked them up on the heater in the computer room.

Then I taped the heater control in the “off” position so I couldn’t accidentally turn it on.

And I shivered a whole bunch in the first few months of the year.

But, it did the trick.  Faced with an impending return to Fall weather, I finally managed to get myself back on task, and today I encoded the last bloody tape to MPEG-2 format and the last batch of MPEG-2 to divx conversions is running as I type this.

I am DONE.

Life is good.

My wife’s monitor died in explosive fashion, and as the wonderful person she is, she decided that she would take MY old monitor and allow me free reign to purchase a new one for myself.

This display of generosity came at an unfortunate time, however, since she waited a few hours between her monitor dying and telling me that I could buy a better one for myself… by that time, I’d already, uh, bought a better one for myself with the intention of giving her the hand-me-down, without, you know, checking with her that it was OK.

So I feel a bit like a heel, but at the same time I have a cool monitor now, so I’m a heel with a cool monitor anyway.
This being a Gateway FHD2400, which is a lovely shiny 24″ 1920×1200 monitor. Not that those stats are, in themselves, anything especially crazy, but this thing also goes way beyond the norm in terms of inputs - it’s got the standard DVI and VGA, of course, but also has S-video, Component, Composite, and HDMI inputs. For a guy with far too many old video game consoles around, this thing is just about perfect.

No picture because my desk is a horrific mess right now. It’s, uh, a big shiny monitor with chrome trim. I’ll let you envision that.

Filed under “organization” because it’s going to let me get rid of a 24″ Toshiba CRT TV that has the most annoying shadow mask in the history of CRT displays. It’s something I managed not to notice for a very long time, but once it was pointed out it became something I couldn’t unsee.
I hate that.