2018: Day 95 the one with some 2018 Open Day Topps baseball cards
Word count 183,113 + 1,327 or 184,440 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Today was a day that I celebrated deactivating my Facebook account. My favorite method of simple celebration is to break open a hobby box of baseball or football sports trading cards. This time around it was a small box with 11 packs of 2018 Topps Opening Day baseball cards. Baseball is now in season and opening day or opening day weekend events are happening from coast to coast. I almost live streamed my trading card opening on YouTube using the camera tab option for live streaming direct from my Chrome browser. My tests turned out ok with a combination of the Samson condenser mic and Logitech Brio 4K webcam. The video quality was only 1080 HD and that does not really work for me. I mean it is sort of 4K or bust at this point within my YouTube adventures. Maybe they will update the stream from browser option to support the native resolution of my webcam. Maybe I will try to put that in as a feature request. That is probably something I can manage to log tomorrow.
Opening the packs of sports trading cards was pretty fun. The opening day series from Topps includes mascot related cards. That surprised me for sure. None of the cards in the 11 packs I opened contained any relic, signatures, memorabilia, or limited numbering. All the cards in my packs were pretty much base series cards. Years ago that was how it worked. I bought packs of cards at the grocery store and later sorted them into the series for the year. Thinking back on that process I was probably buying or getting cards from the same hobby boxes at the same stores until they ran out or moved to the next year packs. All of those cards are sitting in some Rubbermaid tubs in the basement. They go back to around 1987. Collecting cards was so much simpler back then for a lot of reasons. The number of brands was more limited. The on card and sticker on card autograph and game used memorabilia movement had not started. Sometimes they had some alternate series or inserts, but they were mostly promotional in nature and were not instantly worth hundreds of dollars.
You had basically two choices to build out a set. First, you could buy pack after pack and hope that you made it from around 1 to 600. That would involve a process that inherently involved duplicates that could be traded or sold. The packs contain seemingly random allotments of cards. Second, you could wait and buy the whole set in a small cardboard box. That typically came later or around the holidays. Sometimes for Christmas I would get a box of the whole year. At one point, I thought that was the way to go and wanted to collect every box of Topps baseball from 1989 forward. That was something that I gave up on and that was probably for the best. Those boxes take up a lot of space and are harder to store than the tens of thousands of single cards that are stacked together in boxes in my basement. My method of collecting did not change for some time. Recently I just buy packs every once in awhile for the thrill of opening them and that is about it. Most of my purchases of sports trading cards are graded autograph or George Brett cards.
That does require a little bit more space per card, but it has worked out pretty well. I spend a lot of time working on my complete set of George Brett cards. It is sort of a player specific anthology of every card from every year encapsulated in a graded card slab and authenticated by a professional sports grading card service. I really only use Beckett Grading Services and PSA to grade my cards. My preference is for Beckett graded cards, but a lot of the older cards are really only found in PSA slabs. I went through a phase where I was just buying up pretty much every Kansas City Royals autograph card that was under $5 in either a graded or stand alone format. Those cards are the only collection I keep out and by my desk. I typically only keep one graded George Brett card out at a time on my desk. My entire collection is not worth all that much money, but it is valuable to me and that is pretty much the essence of sports card collecting. It’s mostly cardboard. To some people at some times in their lives it has a certain value. Based on that reality a market exists for people who collect and or live within the ecosystem.
The thumbnail for today is a picture of the cards I opened today. You can see the hobby box they came in and the leftover packaging and cards all stacked together. That photograph is not the best I have ever taken, but the sun was creating some lighting challenges. I probably should have tried to sneak a George Brett card into the background. Laziness might have won out on that one. Over the last few days I have been trying to get away from the topic based writing schema and move to a more holistic single topic essay with some thoughtful interludes. Sure my efforts on that one did not last all that long. They dissolved into where we are about to go. Into a series of topics as we round out the night.
Topic 1: Blizzard really wants to sell me the new World of Warcraft expansion
Sure the entire topic is pretty much summed up in the header. Maybe my tagline for this topic was just overly work economic or the topic does not have much depth. That will not slow me down today. It is true that the Blizzard software company really wants to sell me the new World of Warcraft expansion pack. The game itself was released back in November of 2004. Sure that was a long time ago. It was a fun game and from what I remember it was enjoyable to play. I have not purchased all the subsequent expansion packages. I know that people are still playing and that the game has a very active user base. The last games I purchased were for the Xbox and they were Titanfall 2 and Overwatch. I was able to play both of them and they were fun enough. For some reason, I simply do not have the free time to devote to playing video games anymore. That is probably the reason that buying the new expansion package does not appeal to me. This email states that, “The next World of Warcraft expansion, Battle for Azeroth, arrives August 14, 2018.” That sounds exciting enough, but it is probably not enough to get me to play the game. I really liked Overwatch when it came out and I do not play it anymore. We don’t really play any games on our Xbox One S.
Topic 2: I do not need to surf online for a new monitor
Apparently, the new version of my computer monitor is the, “Dell U3818DW 37.5″ Curved UltraSharp Monitor with InfinityEdge Display.” It looks pretty good and it could be epic on my desk. My current monitor is the, “Dell UltraSharp U3415W 34-Inch Curved LED-Lit Monitor.” Nothing is wrong with my current monitor and I do not need to buy a new one. Seriously, I have no reason to be surfing online for a new monitor. Maybe it is one of those things that just happens and you have to ignore it. Things could be worse I could be expanding one of my collections for no real reason. Right now my Corsair 740 Air case is connected to the Dell U3415W and it works just fine.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
