We make plans and the gods laugh. Hot and humid, but maybe slightly less so? I can hope can’t I? It was both yesterday, so maybe I wouldn’t have gotten much outside stuff done anyway. I’ll try again today.
Spent the whole day reading and regretting my life choices yesterday. I’m really glad I only had two slices of salami as I am pretty sure that was the only iffy thing I ate.
I did get a couple of minor things done. I’d ordered another cool vest, one that uses phase change ‘icepacks’ instead of evaporation. I have one at the BOL and decided it was worth having one here for the next attic adventure. Unfortunately it arrived sans ice pack. I’m not paying $165 for a cloth vest so I got the return thing going with Amazon. Because I almost never return anything, they’re doing an advance replacement, and I can just drop the one I got at UPS. (it shipped Saturday night, same day service)
That is quite a bit better than my wife’s typical return, even though she doesn’t abuse the system. She does return items for good reasons a couple of times a month. There are going to be new social and practical differentiators in this new world… like credit score used to be. Some might end up being very valuable, some will only be an annoyance.
How the dossier based economy treats you is going to be evolving and probably invisible to most people, and there will be things like ‘redlining’ where some people won’t even be offered some choices, like getting the Harry and David catalog without asking for it used to be. Dynamic pricing might factor in how hard you are to deal with, like the ‘asshole tax’ some contractors add to certain clients. You pay more because you return more, or because you don’t have the right network of connections and your decisions only impact you. Everyone is an influencer to some extent.
We have this already to some degree but it’s not automated. You have almost no chance of working in certain places if you haven’t been to the right schools and met the right people. You get better loans if you have good credit, better schools if you have a higher SAT, better legal outcomes if you live in the right area and move in the right circles, etc.
Imagine that applying to EVERYTHING in your life. What food you eat, ads you see, people you meet, jobs you can get, schools your kids get offers from, what your gas costs, how much spying your appliances do, and it’s all automated, judgemental, and there is no appeal. We have real world versions of this now, but they involve humans, and there are ways to break out or work around.
Just from cell phone location data, someone or -thing knows my daughter’s age, school, hobbies, friends, the friends’ homes, their parents, where they work, how much they work, what their incomes and ethnicities are, can infer worldview and politics when they don’t know it explicitely (from where the kids go), religion or not, and dozens of other things I can’t think of at the moment.
Add the panopticon of online surveillance and app spying, keyword listening, and soon facial recognition in large integrated camera networks, tie in buying habits from app use, loyalty cards, credit cards, curated feeds, and couple it with the new ‘ad men’ who will algorithmically shape opinion, taste, trends, desires, thoughts, and even knowledge by what you are exposed to and you’ll have programmed masses acting on the will of hidden puppet masters.
And if AI ever decides to subtly take control of that?
Even the puppet masters will be shaped by forces unknown to them while they think themselves above being affected.
————
Or we’ll be struggling to find enough to eat when the whole world collapses into Bangladesh.
Preps will help. At least for a while.
nick
Sunday. Good morning!
Nick’s dire prognostications: gastric distress fever dreams, or the world as we will know it? Eric Blair, call your office…
I am sad this morning. My late father would have celebrated his 99th birthday today. I miss him.
His birthday, at the start of August, always fell in the high-summer part of summer holidays for me as a child, the jolliest time of the season; a birthday high-tea, ripe summer fruit, cucumbers and tomatoes, summer festivals and concerts, swimming in the sea and messing around with boats, making hay and drinking clear, cold water from the well-spring in the hayfield, summer holidays and adventures with my family. Good times. Times to remember.
OK. That was magnetic tape, but not a console into the system. All the 360’s and 370’s I have seen and used had a keyboard that was part of a custom console specifically for the machine.
OK, interesting. I graduated from a 1401 to my next IBM being a 360. I guess I was lucky to skip the 1410.
Based on what the movie producers knew at the time and technology of the time I guess a Selectric was a decent choice. Other consoles used were just teletypes, with printing on paper. Two different versions of consoles. In addition there was voice recognition which resulted in a primitive display, one line, maybe 30 characters. One part sophisticated, the other part really primitive. Just like the consoles. A Selectric is highly superior to a teletype.
That disk drive must have been really primitive, slow, huge, and not a lot of storage. Repairs would have been a nightmare as some of the stuff required high bandwidth, dual trace, sophisticated oscilloscopes costing several thousands of dollars. Especially aligning the heads on the hard drive.
You were a brave soul.
“I lost 2 pounds in the last couple of days, and 9 since returning from the cruise 6 weeks ago. Yeah, I’m not really trying to lose weight. ”
Working when it’s pushing 100 in the shade and 140 in the attic is not a weight losss program, but it’s close.
0.5″ magnetic tape cartridges and electro-mechanical encoders.
“Paperwork Explosion” by The Jim Henson Company for IBM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IZw2CoYztk
Notice how they have the token non-white face play the engineer.
O’Donnell Calls Trump…
https://hotair.com/headlines/2026/08/02/odonnell-calls-trump-pedophile-convicted-sexual-rapist-w-no-pushback-n3817545
That should be $50 from the network, $50 from Navarro, and another $50 from O’Donnell.
Nick’s cogitation on social credit scores in the OP is interesting. It’s really an evolution, because I know I helped implement it for a company in about 1980.
My client, a concrete company in Spokane, had an integrated order, billing and invoice system that I supported for them. You call in, give your customer info, the mix and amount you want, and time and location for delivery. It produced a delivery ticket for the driver, a load ticket for the mixmaster, and when the delivery ticket was turned in, initiated billing to the contractor/homeowner.
Execs went to an industry convention in Las Vegas and came back, not hungover, but rather inspired and motivated. They saw a presentation about how bad customers cost you money, and how to fix it. It was a small series of simple changes, to track how certain customers abused the system, and the introduction of charges for excessive wait times. Drivers had to collect 2 new pieces of information: Actual arrival at the jobsite, and when they finished and could return to the plant. The billing system invoiced anything over X minutes as an additional charge. I don’t remember the value of X, it was 45 years ago. GMAB.
Frequent flyers started paying more for their mixes, too.
They were very happy with the results. Bad customers do cost you money.
The problem with social credit systems is a matter of both degree and kind. A vendor protecting his interests, based on specific customer history, is one thing. A political entity, or politicized business using their power to punish alternative views or beliefs is another.
Except anyone punishing commies and mohammedans is ok with me.
There was a movement in businesses in the past 10 years or so about ‘firing bad clients’. I got an email from my out of state financial advisor that had an attachment with the filename “fireclient”, which was clearly a model letter to clients that don’t generate enough fees…
———-
Guts feel a lot better today. Coffee is started. Back needs stretching.
———-
I have been doing a lot of physical work in the heat in the last six weeks, but if it was that easy to lose weight, everyone would be doing it.
I have been thinking about it. Where does the mass go when you “lose two pounds”. Sh!t it out? The water can be sweated out, but you’ll get it back as soon as possible when you rehydrate. Some gets turned to energy, but how much energy and how much waste per pound? Liquid or solid?
———-
Coffee. That’s what it’s time for.
n
Amazon tracks the profit received from every account. If the customer’s account reaches a point where the algorithms predict that the individual will be a net loss to the company over the course of their lifetime, the account gets blacklisted with little possibility of reinstatement.
Outside of Amazon, Fedex and UPS are each establishing similar customer monitoring systems for their clients who lack the resources of Bezos minions.
Not counting water loss, most of it is breathed out as CO2.
To expound: Fat loss is purely hydrocarbon, which is various combinations of H, C, and O. This is ultimately broken down to H2O and CO2. Some of the H2O leaves as liquid, some as vapor, and all the CO2 is vapor. Some complex molecules like ketones can leave via urine or vapor.
Protein loss is similar, but adds N and traces of other elements. Depending on how you’re losing the protein, it can be urinated intact or broken down and expelled as vapor. Protein in your urine is generally a bad thing.
Sugars can be urinated if you’re diabetic, or broken down just like fats. But except for a small amount of endogenous Glucose/Glycogen, that’s not weight loss, just eliminating what you ate.
@Nick
Metabolism is chemical reactions.
A glucose molecule is C6H12O6.
The balanced chemical equation is C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O . Oxidation.
Everything on the right-hand side is expelled as gases when you exhale.
When the body runs out of ready sugars, it pulls from the stored fats. Lots of energy releasing intermediate reactions go on, but at the end of the process most of the carbons end up as carbon dioxide–more oxidation–and most of the hydrogens end up as water. The non-respirable residual is excreted, but is not much–note that if you quit eating you pretty much quit sh*tting.
There is probably a page on the internet that shows exactly what happens to a pound of metabolized fat.
Yeah, what they said.
The two-percenter fintech advisor bros have watches they want to buy.
I still enjoy it. The three book series fills in the gaps. Plus ALIENS! We could be a step away from Global Nuclear War if some dipshit gives an AI the keys to the nukes.
I got a 1% guy who treats me right and I’m a small potatoes account to him.
I know 2%ers who won’t touch less than $2.5 million accounts. My GF, and my 1% guy both used to work at one. That’s how I met him, and I saw how he treated his clients before I became one.
On Alan Ritchson: He really went down the shitter with TDS. He made a movie War Machine about alien machines taking over Earth. It lost all credibility to me because of him, although I liked the flic. He shows up to Ranger school with a beard and long hair. Yeah, no. Every other candidate was shaved. I guess Ritchson didn’t want authenticity. He’s a star, you see. Then the complete TDS mania started coming out. It made me rethink the squabble he had with his neighbor. He was probably the dick his neighbor said he was.
I’ll watch the next season of Reacher, but will dump it if TDS comes through.
I have never liked that take on commerce. The idea is that there is no difference between an employee relationship, which is a business paying for performance, and a client relationship, which I think should be a business earning revenue by performance. The direction of effort is not the same.The “firing bad clients’ concept tries to give the business the same level and type of control of transactions in both directions. If you want peoples’ business, you should be making the effort to accommodate them, not require accommodations from them. Abusive customers are a separate issue, but you still don’t ‘fire’ them. You refuse service. Not the same, and a different mindset.
“Firing” clients can be nuanced.
The Pareto principle says that 80% of your difficulty comes from 20% of your customers. And that means that in a service industry, cutting 20% of your customers eliminates 80% of your customer service labor.
The numbers are an exaggeration but the principle is true just the same. Accommodate the majority of your clientele, but realize that the customers at the margins are expensive. Investing expensive capital and labor into chasing the 1% of customers who are Karens would build your business volume, but you’d be better off investing the capital into bonds. The new customers could actually lose you money.
Businesses are not charities.
I had only considered two of the three states of matter, even though my gut issues involved all three. (I’m not counting plasma, since I didn’t eat at Taco Bell.)
I almost never think of gasses as having mass, so didn’t consider that a lot of the weight was in exhales… that’s actually kinda nuts when you think about it.
(I do sometimes, and we even had a case at work where a project was failing because of the gas having mass that did unplanned things during high G events. IDK if I talked about it here, but details might be specific enough to out me, so think about xenon moving away from where it’s supposed to be in a sealed package, leaving a process unprotected when a very high G event takes place.) Gasses move under acceleration.
—————
Completely unrelated. I have noticed that sometimes the autogenerated subtitles or CC on youtube videos can be //different// from the spoken word. Sometimes there is an obvious censorship, but sometimes the censorship doesn’t match (audio gets clipped out, but CC is there, or CC gets c**t obfuscated but audio remains. Sometimes the CC is just wrong, or the wrong word because of context. And SOMETIMES it’s hilarious. IDK if the creators can put their own CC or not, but this is the biggest and funniest disparity I’ve noticed. Plus, l like watching this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X-nC6QyGQ9Q?feature=share
n
“I almost never think of gasses as having mass, so didn’t consider that a lot of the weight was in exhales… that’s actually kinda nuts when you think about it.”
Think of your body as a bonfire. In a good fire most of the wood goes up as hot gases (with a little particulate) and there is a small residual mass in the ash.
If you didn’t exhale most of what you ate and drink be in the can most of the time, and your tp bill would be enormous.
“The Pareto principle says that 80% of your difficulty comes from 20% of your customers. And that means that in a service industry, cutting 20% of your customers eliminates 80% of your customer service labor.”
So the business should fire 20% of their clients and 80% of their customer service employees?
The measure of a business is not just doing good work. Even the best businesses can have something go wrong despite their best efforts on a given day. (Wrong part gets shipped, transportation fails to deliver, the weather or some other event screws everything up) Good customer service entails addressing the problem and converting a dissatisfied customer into a satisfied and loyal customer. It also entails knowing when that is not possible and making the best of it for all concerned. The after-action report should be studied to find out how to reduce problems in the future.
There are times when firing a customer is obviously appropriate. Dishonesty, verbal abuse, and other actions that are over the line. But any business that fires customers should also be interested in the flip side: Why do some customers not come back?
Still want to watch Reacher?
https://hotair.com/larry-elder/2026/08/02/reacher-actor-and-the-stench-of-a-double-standard-n3817490
Check the earrings.
I went shopping with a friend this morning and she said “Hey, there’s an estate sale down the block you might be interested in, lots of sci-fi books”. Normally I don’t do yard sale at all and I find esstate sales kind of depressing, but I agreed.
Holy cow, you know the libraries of major authors that we were talking about yesterday? This was probably something like that. I couldn’t get a name out of any of the help but the house owner was obviously a tremendous fan, had a library that was roughly 60 x 40, 2 stories, and was also a
bighuge SCA guy.You want to live stream and do some shopping for us?
How are the prices?
To expound: Fat loss is purely hydrocarbon, which is various combinations of H, C, and O. This is ultimately broken down to H2O and CO2. Some of the H2O leaves as liquid, some as vapor, and all the CO2 is vapor. Some complex molecules like ketones can leave via urine or vapor.
CO2 does not form a liquid phase below 5 atmospheres. So, all CO2 goes out as a vapor.
If you have 5 atmospheres in your body, you will have serious problems when reducing to regular atmosphere. This is why scuba divers get the bends if they are not careful.
I have an obvious bee in my bonnet. I admit that. But. You don’t ‘fire’ customers. You fire employees, with whom you have a preexisting and ongoing fiduciary relationship. You refuse service to customers, with whom you may or may not have a preexisting economic relationship, who have, are, or create problems. As I said, it’s the mind set. I think that the concept came from ‘professional’ endeavors, like lawyers, doctors, etc., for the convenience of said lawyers and doctors to explain away why ‘professionals’ are free to choose to not accept clients but bakers are not.
The bee in my bonnet is that words mean things, and redefining them only for the convenience of the orator is underhanded, sneaky and wrong. Like the acronyms AMAB/AFAB (assigned male at birth/assigned female at birth), where the word assigned is redefined to cover the act of noticing and recording which physical gender is observed at birth, in order to blame doctors / caregivers / parents for the issues arising from dissatisfaction with the roles and choices available to each gender, rather than understanding and accepting them.
I almost never think of gasses as having mass, so didn’t consider that a lot of the weight was in exhales… that’s actually kinda nuts when you think about it.
This is what my software is mostly about. Dense phases are mostly vapor that is under compression and extremely non-ideal. PV = zRT where z is a factor from 1.0 (ideal) to 0.01, highly non-ideal.
I have 200,000 lines of code dealing with calculating z in mixtures up to 1,000 chemicals, 3 K to 5,000 K, and 0.01 atm to 2,000 atm.
You are literally killing me with that.
“You are my density!”
–George McFly
The Great “Hot Drought” Humbug: Why Lake Powell Is Really Drying Up
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/07/30/the-great-hot-drought-humbug-why-lake-powell-is-really-drying-up/
Much of the American South, Southwest, and West is consuming water at an unsustainable rate and has been doing so for decades.
As I’ve observed before, the single largest act of conservation would be to deport all the illegals who have invaded our country and are consuming our resources at a higher rate than they would be consuming resources in their native countries.
I’m home.
Prices were $5-$10 for hardbacks, there were almost no paperbacks at all, which was weird. Supposedly they were going to be half priced this afternoon.
I bought about a dozen, some Heinlein and an old non-sci-fi Poul Anderson, but really I shut down at estate sales, can’t really deal with the thought that these people are gone and just their things remain. Given warning I can deal, but sprung on me not so much.
I also picked up about a kilowatt’s worth of solar panels and supposedly the charge controllers that go with them for about $150. They were just sitting there in the yard with the sticker on them next to the cashier, and I never quite got around to buying any, so… I actually had to borrow money from my friend’s wife since I didn’t have any on me.
The exterior was bland 70’s, the interior was huge, all stone and tile, and faux medieval, with cressets and real stained glass and gargoyles and a marble bath and spiral staircases and you name it.
—
Reverse Lookup of the address says James Yelton, 40, not a name I know. A distant descendant of Leigh Brackett or Edmund Hamilton maybe?
A good fart will do something close.
My brother the submariner would occasionally give warning: “Pressure in the boat!”. I learned to roll down the car window. Brothers.
Yesterday I was overpressuring the boat…
—
When I first went to estate sales I was really weirded out by the whole thing. People going thru your life and arguing that it’s not worth what little they were asking. And your leftover stuff is usually kinda sad looking.
HOWEVER. Since I’m there looking for things I like/need/love/will use I reframed it. If you loved your stuff, wouldn’t you want it to go to someone else who will love it? The Starrett protractor set with tri-square and dividing head might have cost you a bag full, but you used it to make a living for 40 years or in a hobby you loved. The young guy who gets it for $10 to replace the nasty empire one he bought before he knew anything, or the other codger who will put it on the shelf with the rest of his collection, are a whole lot better than it just going in the dumpster…
Your only living relative, the grandchild of your cousin in Arizona knows nothing about your ham gear, but the guys coming to the estate sale to build out their own shack or even to buy stuff to resell, will get that gear into the hands of someone who will use and appreciate it.
Yeah, I still occasionally walk into a sale that is so F’ed up I can hardly look at stuff, because some people’s lives are just sad, and their deaths are sadder still. But usually, I feel good about getting the guy’s treasure to someone who will treasure them.
n
The alternatives to the estate sale are Goodwill and the dump.
Or what I’ve done with much of my brother’s car stuff: gave the race cars to a couple of people who would appreciate them and use them. Motorcycle to the nephew who would most appreciate it. Regular car to the nephew who most needed it. Almost all of the tools to me, since I’ll probably make best use of them (in part by putting together kits to give my kids).
Rabid, Lifetime Democrat James Carville Just Put His Party on Notice
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2026/08/02/rabid-lifetime-democrat-james-carville-just-put-the-party-on-notice-n2205088
To paraphrase, the sh*t-eating liar finally got a whiff of a bite that he can’t stomach.
I hope he opens the news every morning for months and sees the progression as the commies invade his party, destroy it from within, excommunicate the old hardliners like himself, and burn it down to a smoking, stinking ruin. The truth is that he knows that is exactly what is coming. He has had no compunction about the destruction of his country bit-by-bit by the disastrous policies of his party and the egomaniacs and thieves that he has embraced for years. What frightens him is that he and all of his friends will not end up ruling but will be swept away themselves as the perfectly predictable progression of the communist disease eats him alive and leaves nothing. If I found him burning in a ditch I would do everything I could to keep him alive and extend his suffering.
It’s like the retard has never read a history book.
“Almost all of the tools to me, since I’ll probably make best use of them (in part by putting together kits to give my kids).”
When my father died I bought 22″ Plano toolboxes and filled them with starter sets of tools for every one of the grandchildren. They all got hammers, multiple pliers, multiple screwdrivers, a socket set and a bunch of miscellaneous.
“It’s like the retard has never read a history book.”
His party is directly responsible for two generations of U.S. students not being taught history and having no reasoning skills to expose the fallacies of communism.
My dad and I did something like that for The Elder Child, a toolbox and tool belt with stuff useful for working on cars and houses. The vast majority came from extras Dad and I had. I did need to buy a few things but it was probably not more than 10% of the total. (Other than a very good toolbelt and protective gear.) I don’t think any of the other grandkids got such, mostly because they weren’t interested.
The Child has a small toolkit in her car, along with a crate of fluids and flat fixer and jumpstart battery pack and what-not. She knows a few of the things needed to take care of problems but my realistic expectation from putting the stuff in the trunk was that she’d be able to ask someone for help and the other person would be able to use the tools and fluids to at least get the car moving. She has used the toolkit for a few tasks around the dorm room, tightening up screws on furniture and such.
I somehow have the three disc set of Home Alone. Nothing I would have ever bought.
The first movie was fine. I really do not think I have ever watched it. The second movie was basically a re-run. The third movie was decent and not a lot of screaming.
Just goofy fun to watch movies.
@Nick: That’s a nice way to think of it.
Yeah, if I had the space I’d buy it all and give it a good home!
My Dad got me one of these years ago when I moved out.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Craftsman-Storage-20-Wide-3-Drawer-Ball-Bearing-CMST98245RB/857553656?wmlspartner=wlpa&selectedSellerId=103090808&sourceid=dsn_mpmax_b7816648-c1aa-4cbe-a348-bade7e6d185e&veh=dsn&wmlspartner=dsn_mpmax_b7816648-c1aa-4cbe-a348-bade7e6d185e&cn=00pd_fy27_mp_mp_lo_int_dis_mpmax-p13n&wl9=&wl11=Online&msclkid=de49965471e91fef4975fc3ba6603944
I still have it, and I filled it with a basic set of tools for my son when he moved out on his own this summer. I have a lot of tools, but I don’t really have extras, so I picked up most of what I needed at Harbor Freight. One tool I did pass on was the hammer Dad gave me.
Oh, and speaking of the boy, I sent him a text yesterday. I stated simply “Happy financial Independence Day!”
He is completely on his own. I’m not worried. He has a good head on his shoulders, is budgeting and saving well, and is a natural saver.
And one more good piece of news for him. Apparently his health insurance through work is better than what we have, On our plan, insulin had a copay of $45. On his plan, it is $27. That savings will add up over the years.
Or what I’ve done with much of my brother’s car stuff:
– yeah, but that rarely happens as few people know the deceased’s friends or acquaintances and few care enough to spend the time and energy.
n
Our friend’s mother died, but no one would take any of her stuff in donation because she was a heavy smoker right up until the bitter end and everything in the house was old/stained.
Estate sales definitely passed.
In the end, I think that they called 1-800-Got-Junk.
Austin far exceeded the available surface reservoir capacity about a decade ago, and the region’s water supply relies heavily on drawing from the underground aquifer which cannot be replenished.
It is 132 F in my backyard according to my sun facing thermometer.
It was 105 F in the HEB parking lot, SWAG.
It is 103 F according to Wunderground.
It is 72 F in my house which I vastly prefer.
We went up to Belton yesterday for the annual comic convention at the expo center, and I was struck by how the previously “anti growth” communities along I-35 seem to have abandoned that stand to cash in on the Colonists’ demand for new/big housing within “reasonable” driving distance of the big tech employers.
The comic show continues to get bigger. Some of the growth is from civilians scouting for Pokemon cards, but the overwhelming majority of the dealers were not there to sell cards.
While I didn’t stop for his autograph, as I was waiting to get a signature on a DVD from another actor, I saw Lou Ferigno signing and posing for selfies with fans at the next booth over.
Ferigno is 74 but in really good shape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9MysTXM_P4
Still 90F at my house.
Stayed indoors all day. Did office and auction stuff.
n
“Since I’m there looking for things I like/need/love/will use I reframed it.”
The secondary market for books has been well-established for more than a century. I have many books that include the previous owners name–abbreviated “PON” in catalogs–or inscriptions. Most collectors do not consider it a significant defect unless the book is otherwise F/F (Fine book in Fine Dust jacket). Serious collectors will pay extra for books with provenance, meaning owned by the author, owned by someone close to the author, inscribed by the author to someone, inscribed by a famous person to another famous person, etc.
Tools also have a well-established secondary market. Watch the old boys line up to get in the garage at the estate sales. Kitchen tools are about the same.
One sadness comes with an estate that has personal items that should not be in a sale, but obviously there was no family or no one in the family that cared. Another is a collection that took years to assemble, but no one wanted. Travel souvenirs such as spoons and shot glasses are a little sad. The worst is seeing the Franklin Mint, the Hummels, the Bradford exchange plates, the blue delft plates and other “collectibles” that were simply scams. At least the price of silver is finally high enough that some of the FM products will recoup more than their purchase price, even though they were never an investment.
There are some items that should not be in sales–family documents, photos, military medals, many things associate with the Mason’s, etc. Some years ago I purchased a lot that included an article of historic significance to a school in Peru. I sent it to them with a note requesting that they acknowledge the return, but never heard back–it was still the right thing to do.
Furniture goes in cycles. Some “name” mission furniture that sold for a few dollars up until the 70’s was bid up to many thousands in the 80’s and 90’s, but has come back down considerably since. People collected Depression glass, amassed thousand of pieces, wrote the books that identified the “rare” variations, and cashed out. MSM furniture, particularly the “atomic” themed products are about at the peak now. Comic books, sports cards, gaming cards, video games, and other items are at various points in their curves.
@ITGuy1998
For many years Craftsman branded tool and tool boxes were a solid standard. U.S. made Craftsman is still holding value–it sells reliably well on-line, but their are lots of bargains at estate sales. I picked up two 70’s/80’s corded Craftsman drills recently and paid $5 for the pair. One 3/8″ and one 1/2″. I have the exact 3/8″ and can tell you that it will give you as much torque as you want when running a 5″ paint mixer in a 5-gallon bucket–sometimes plugs are better than batteries.
Harbor Freight has increasingly stepped into the Craftsman niche. Sears used to run one Craftsman tool dirt cheap in their Sunday ads in the 70’s, and perusing HF sales and coupons is well worthwhile if you are building a tool collection.
Nintendo 64 cartridges are in demand right now due to the company’s revival of the Starfox IP and emergence of two emulator systems which recreate the original console hardware with really impressive accuracy.
Even without the emulators, Nintendo and Silicon Graphics engineered the N64 really well, and most of the production run still powers on without an issue.
Anything nintendo sells well, and Sega consoles too.
The “Batocera” emulator popped up in my yt shorts and I’m gonna check it out. I loved MAME and still want to build a tabletop arcade machine. I’ve got all the stuff, but not the time or space. In fact I picked up two really big and heavy trackballs last week that would be perfect for a build. I really liked a game called Crystal Castles. It’s non-violent and used a trackball, two things I didn’t like in arcade games, but I really liked it. I’d like to play it again. Time Pilot is one that ate a lot of my lunch money too.
You can’t give away old china, hummels, collectible plates, Precious Memories, beanie babies, etc. At estate sales with a ton of Christmas collectibles, most of it goes unsold.
MCM is having a resurgence, and I think the atomic age stuff is related to the game Fallout. There is Nuka Cola in my Costco right now…
The old games didn’t have the killer graphics so they had to be about the gameplay. Kids are discovering that just like they are discovering our music.
D1’s playlist while showering tonight was insanely eclectic and she was singing along with most of it. Really it’s like it is totally random, except it skips the 50s and 60s sock hop/surf/pop culture. Plenty of 60s rock though. The other night she had Zepplin in her playlist. Of course, they have no context or understanding of the meaning or significance of any of it. I do try, but they are resistant.
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Had a tiny little fire while reading, and there was even a little bit of cool breeze every now and again, but it’s still pretty warm out.
Time for a shower and bed. D2 needs a taxi at 10am so I have to be dressed and moving before then.
n