My post about downscaling my gaming habit got me thinking about my other hobbies, some of the unfortunate side effects they cause, and what to do about them. (And holy shit, did I file this under enough categories, or what?)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate any of my hobbies; I’m just not pleased that I have far too many of them. In my neverending quest to become a somewhat decent human being, I do understand that sometimes the most innocuous hobbies can cause problems with one’s life. The main issue is that a majority of my hobbies revolve around acquiring some kind of physical object, such as an action figure, building set, video game, book, et cetera. As such, this immediately creates two problems: price and space. You need money to buy said item, and a place in which to display or store it. Both of these are serious issues, and even worse, they sometimes compound one another! I’m not affluent (or even upper middle class) by any stretch of the imagination, so indulging in my hobbies tends to have financial ramifications down the line that I’m not always prepared for. So what’s a man to do?

Here’s a rundown of my various hobbies, and the problems I’m running into while keeping up with them. Aside from giving you an insight into my madness, it’ll help me keep track of this stuff later on. I should point out that this stuff was all acquired over the course of a decade or two; I certainly don’t have the cash to acquire massive quantities of stuff in a short period of time!

• LEGO®. This one gives no quarter; the entire premise of being a LEGO® fan is based on the building sets themselves. You need to own at least a few in order to get involved! The upshot is that once you’ve got a good amount of bricks, you can create just about anything you want. You can display an official model for a while, then if you get tired of it, rebuild it into something else. It’s not like a collectible game, where you’re absolutely required to spend money on a regular basis just to stay competitive! (That’s the exact reason why I gave up on playing Magic: The Gathering long ago, and Axis & Allies Miniatures more recently.) With my LEGO® addiction, space has become my biggest challenge. I’ve completely run out of room to display my sets (mainly Star Wars ships), so I’ve been forced to disassemble many of them.

• Star Trek. The beloved science fiction franchise spans over forty years of history, twenty-nine seasons of television, and eleven films, not to mention all of the countless merchandising and other goodies. The television shows and films are most important to me; I own all of the films (save the newest one, which isn’t available on disc yet, and Star Trek V, which is crap), but only five of the twenty-nine seasons. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and that’s not going to be cheap. Granted, Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise can wait until the very end, but I’ve still got a majority of the original series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine to pick up.
• Star Wars. The core of this franchise is the films, and there’s not many of those; that made collecting them quite easy. I also enjoy reading some of the novels, and collecting the artbooks and other reference tomes. However, when it comes to Star Wars action figures…therein lies the rub. Even casual fans of the franchise know how addicting that can be, and I’m no different. I used to display them in my office at work (gotta be the stereotypical IT department, and all), but since we moved to a new location, I now have a cubicle rather than an office. Thus, I no longer have a door that I can lock. I don’t think anyone would pilfer or otherwise screw with my collection, but why not err on the side of caution? Since I’ve got nowhere else to put them, though, they now sit in a box in my apartment complex storage space.
• Model railroads. While this is one of my most enjoyed hobbies, it’s sadly one of the most neglected, simply to due to the high cost. I’m “over the hump,” as it were; the most expensive pieces of my layout were the tracks, locomotives, and control system. However, I’ve still got landscaping materials to buy, plus model cars and tiny little people. Those aren’t cheap! If I don’t finish my layout this summer, I’ve got a feeling it will be indefinitely shelved.
• Video games. Ouch. This one’s definitely the 800-pound gorilla in the room, since I play a lot of games. They’ve never been cheap, and with more and more titles coming out all the time, with more platforms competing for market share, costs can add up insanely fast. Part of this can be alleviated by renting games, but that creates two more problems. One, renting from chains like Blockbuster is a complete ripoff; the rental price is too high, and you’ve only got about five days to play! Two, even if you use a much better system like GameFly, now you run into the subscription problem. Here, you’re paying a flat fee per month to rent a certain number of titles (GameFly wisely offers a tiered system), but what if there’s a few months where nothing’s coming out, or there isn’t anything you’re interested in playing? Now you’re literally spending money on nothing. As far as older titles are concerned, emulation’s a quick solution, but legal issues aside, that doesn’t compare to playing original games on original hardware. It just doesn’t! (I keep a 13″ CRT TV in my room specifically for retrogaming, fer crissake.) I’ve focused much of my attention on my NES collection, but those still take up space. Right now, I’m using the ol’ cardboard-boxes-in-the-closet method, save for a small stack of cartridges I’m actively playing. Those get a place of honor on my desk. Classy.
• Heavy metal. You’d think that simply enjoying listening to music wouldn’t cost too much, since you don’t have to pay to use your ears. And as far as acquiring music goes, that’s inexpensive, too, especially in this day and age of iTunes. Too bad I’m one of those old-fashioned fuckers who enjoys owning actual physical copies of his media! The backlog of discs I still want to buy would probably equal the down payment on a small house. Eesh. My subscriptions to Decibel magazine and the Requiem Metal Podcast have exacerbated this addiction by getting me into many new bands.
• Books. Normally, this isn’t a problem, as we have libraries for all of our reading needs. However, some of the licensed series I enjoy (particularly Star Trek novels) have little to no library presence. Translation: if you want to read it, you’d better buy it, and I’ve bitched about the ridiculous cost of paperbacks before. Even though the recent Star Trek film has breathed new life into the franchise, the books are still a relatively niche commodity. The Star Trek section at my local bookstores just keeps shrinking over time, and when new novels come out, you really need to nab them within a week or so of release, else you run the risk of missing them. Then, of course, there’s the fact that eventually, my bookshelves at home start to get very crowded.
• Manga. Since the stories I enjoy only come out every few months, this one’s at the bottom of the problem pile. Prices are on the rise, though, and I read much of my manga well in advance via scanlations. I buy the official collected English editions later on. If the prices get more annoying, I may dump the printed versions, and just stick to reading them online. And before you bitch at me about the “illegality” of scanlations, they’re not technically illegal, and publishers often use them as a way to gauge interest in localizing new series! Eat me.

As you can see, the solution to many of these issues falls under the usual purview of “stop buying shit.” Which, as it turns out, is something I’m actively working on, especially in the video game realm. I know that sooner or later I’m going to have to no choice but to severely scale back or ditch a few hobbies, but them’s the breaks. It’s happened before (like when I ditched that filthy comic book collectin’ habit), and I’d like to think I’m a better person for it. Life is more than just random collections.

Seriously, fuck Toys R Us’ ridiculous LEGO® pricing.

If you dig around LEGO®’s official Shop at Home page, all of the items there are sold for the standard manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). Stores like Target and Wal-Mart sell them for the same price (with Wal-Mart often knocking off a few cents, as per their modus operandi).

Toys R Us, on the other hand, raises the prices of their LEGO® sets by a few dollars. Even worse, the higher the MSRP, the more TRU adds to the price! Sets with an MSRP of $49.99 are regularly priced at $59.99 at TRU. I understand there’s nothing illegal about doing this, but it pisses off consumers. Adding insult to injury are the sets labeled “special edition.” These are usually exclusive to TRU for at least six months; in other words, if you want the set, you’ve got no choice but to pay the added premium!

This kind of behavior only drives fans away. Someone needs to send TRU management a hot steaming dump in a box.

One thing that myself and many other AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO®) are getting really tired of is the increasing amount of stickers in recent sets. Back in the day, just about any special brick had printing on it, be it a road sign, computer terminal, or logo. There were a few stickers here and there, but most special bricks were printed. Nowadays, however, it’s the complete opposite. Printed bricks are few and far between, and those blasted stickers are everywhere! Even pieces that used to be printed (like the 2×2 round tiles with the Imperial symbol from Star Wars) now use stickers instead! This is irritating for many reasons, the most obvious being that stickers aren’t as durable as the original printed bricks. Plus, even for skilled modelers, the slightest misapplication of a sticker can make the resulting piece stand out like a sore thumb.

So what’s the cause? Laziness? Cheaper production costs? Probably a bit of column A and column B. Either way, we’re shit outta luck.

A big “screw you” goes out to Target, for the particular sale item they’re spotlighting on Black Friday. (That’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, for those of you visiting from Mars.) Allow me to explain. Lately, Target’s been restocking the LEGO® Imperial Star Destroyer.

Originally released in 2006, this big-ass set retails for $99.99. Given my current financial situation, throwing down $100 on a LEGO® set is most certainly not in the cards, nor will it be for a very long time. It’s like Target brought the thing back just to fuck with me. Oh, but wait…it gets worse. On Black Friday, that set’s being marked down to $59.99.

Motherfuckers! That’s a huge deal; 40% off a large-scale set is nothing to scoff at! Why couldn’t they have done that shit over the summer, when I actually had the cash? There’s no way I could justify that purchase right now, massive deal or not.

Furthermore, I absolutely despise the very concept of Black Friday. The overcommercialization of the Christmas season is as disgusting to me as the fundamentalist Christians who try to jam the religious nature of their adopted-from-the-pagans holiday in everyone’s faces. There, I’ve played both sides of the fence, so no one can say I’m unfair. Eat me. Anyway, getting up early to deal with crowds of assholes fighting over deals on fucking toys and other stuff is not my idea of a good time. Human nature sickens me, and nowhere is that more apparent than Christmas shopping. Screw that noise. I refuse to even leave my apartment on Black Friday; I’d much rather enjoy myself playing games or reading a book. In fact, I won’t even go shopping online! Let those mindless sheep fight their way through the malls of our nation. I’ll stay home stress-free, thanks.

Though I still hate what Target’s done. Jerks.

I saw some action figures from Hellboy II: The Golden Army at my local Toys R Us the other day, and after doing a bit of a double-take, I immediately got very angry. No, not because they were shoved at the end of an aisle to make room for the smorgasbord of Star Wars, Transformers, and WWE figures. It’s because of what was done to the packaging, and the likely reasons why.

The Hellboy II figures are not advertised under the film’s name, you see. Instead of the movie logo, there’s a stylized, shortened version that simply reads HBII. The only place on the package where the full name appears is in some tiny legalese on the bottom of the back. You can see where I’m going with this, but trust me, it gets worse. The action figure of the hero of the film, Hellboy himself? He’s not even called by his proper name. What, pray tell, does the package claim his name is?

“Red.”

No, I’m not fucking with you. You might want to read it twice. Instead of using his actual name, the powers-that-be opted for his nickname/codename. This makes no logical sense, because on the official website, they’re clearly labeled as Hellboy II: The Golden Army figures, and the title character is named correctly.

So why the change? Think really hard, people. Remember, I said the changes make no logical sense. And what’s a longstanding enemy of logic? Self-proclaimed “morality.” I’m guessing that uppity, holier-than-thou parents didn’t want their precious little children to see the word “hell” on a toy package. This is complete and utter bullshit, as there’s no shortage of other products (like video games) that have the ol’ H-E-double-hockey-sticks on them. (Including, of course, the sadly crappy Hellboy games.) Not to mention the fact that television shows have no problem dropping the H-bomb in casual conversation; that often includes cartoons, commercials, and even the evening news! Last but not least, the Hellboy II toys themselves aren’t violent, gory, or anything like that. However, there’s plenty of toys that are rather bloody, and you can find them in the same aisle.

Protecting your child is one thing. Blinding them to the realities of the modern world is another. The word “hell” isn’t harmful; it’s just a word. Grow up and cut your kids some damn slack. Ironically, many of the parents who complain the most about words like “hell” are extremely religious. If that’s not a double standard, I don’t know what is.