Night Owl Cards

  I placed what likely will be my final comc order Saturday. I'll write about why I'm feeling that way when the order arrives but I think everyone reading this who has dealt with that site recently knows that it's not what it once was.   I'm going to have to widen my horizons yet again when it comes to purchasing cards. It seems like the reliable old ways -- comc, card shows, retail shelves -- aren't as fool-proof as they once were, and I'm going to need to look for more alternatives.   Fortunately I'm well-connected and my love for the hobby is well-known. Cards can come from any direction as this post will show.   These cards arrived from Alan through the BlueSky giveaway thread. They are TCMA reprints of the 1936 Goudey set (R322). My excitement in getting these -- other than that I love everything TCMA -- is that they're from 1972, which is the first year TCMA began issuing sets. These are the oldest TCMA cards that I own! Heck, they might as well b...

  Just a short post today. Fridays are always busy and it doesn't help that MLB starts the World Series on a Friday now. We sat through three off days so we could get to a day when I absolutely cannot watch. The current configuration means that I will get to see exactly one game live even if it goes a full 7 games. Also no World Series game on a Sunday is appalling. Makes me want to write a strongly worded letter to the commissioner.   So there's not nearly enough time to relay my complicated thoughts about my Dodgers going for a second straight World Series title for the first time in my life as a baseball fan. It's already a weird space to be in, having to constantly bat away "anyone-but-the-Dodgers" spewing on the usual sites. (I spent part of the morning deleting any youtube video suggestion that has to do with "the Dodgers are ruining baseball". Why would these be in my suggestions?)   The Dodgers can do something in the 2025 World Series that has b...

  One of the big reasons that I'm still in this hobby -- and still blogging about it -- is that my life is fairly boring actually.   I do the same things day after day. Even the things I don't do day after day I've done before. It's a whole lot of mundane. Much like baseball, not a lot happens until some explosion of everything all at once. Only, unlike baseball, that chances of that "everything explosion" being good things is highly unlikely.   Trading cards are the excitement in my life. They are the guarantee that each day of my life will produce a little spark. If all those other daily things can't do it, cards will be there for me. Often that spark is a card that's new to my collection. Now, there's something that will make my eyes light up.   For example, this Freddie Freeman All-Star card that arrived recently. I received it with some other items from reader Grant, who is one of those folks nice enough to comment here (try it, it's fun!...

  Like many collectors I am completely over relic cards. When searching for a card I want, I'm never looking for a relic card. I don't list them among my wants, I don't consider them when I'm looking to complete a team set. To a slightly less degree, the same goes for autograph cards. I do search for them on occasion, but very rarely is it a card quest of mine. There isn't a single set issued today in which I'll say "ooh, I want that autograph."   My collecting background does not include chasing hits, so this is pretty much par for the course for me, but they're even more irrelevant than ever to me.   So when Johnny's Trading Spot shipped me two long boxes of Dodgers, about 75 of which contained cards with scribbles or embedded with cloth bits, my brain stared at them for a bit. Sure, some I really liked, but a bunch I honestly don't know what I'll do with them. For now, the best thing they're good for is a blog post. I went throu...

  I have a lot of cards. TCDB says I have 101,790, and I know for a fact that I have more than that, even without including all the Dodgers dupes. So I realize it's not easy to find cards to send me even with a lot of interests. Yet, people still try and I really do appreciate it. Some attempts have been made recently that I need to acknowledge here, there was varying success.   An envelope of cards from the very busy Fuji . The purpose of this send was supplying me with one of the three remaining cards I need from the 1985 Rock Star Concert set. All that's left is a Huey Lewis card and another Pat Benatar card (think the "Love Is A Battlefield" video). Fuji added a couple of Baseball Card Magazine cards from the early '90s, but I own each of those already. The beauty of these cards, though, is they're subject to the cutting whims of the magazine owner. I know for sure that this Ramon Martinez is a finer trim than the one I previously owned. This envelope arri...

This is that weird week where school and some government people are off but I'm not -- which gets even more awkward when members of the same household are off but I am not.   In other words, my time is not my own this week. Let's see if I can pound out a post before I'm swept off somewhere.   I finally completed the 2021 Update Dodgers team set the other day. The Corey Knebel card did not arrive when I ordered the team set online (a Royals card arrived in its place). When I alerted the seller, he said he'd get Knebel right out. He never did. Or the postal system ate it.   I put the card on my Nebulous 9 and reader Rich came to the rescue. What a relief. Very frustrating to have dupes of a parallel of this card but not the actual base card. More from Rich in a later post. Good stuff, too.     This card also completed a team set. I discovered that the Don Drysdale card was missing from what I thought was a completed team for the 1978 TCMA set, the 1960s. That had ...

  Twice within the last few days I have started on a post idea -- pulled cards, done some research -- before figuring out I had already written that post. This is to be expected for someone who has been blogging about cards for more than a dozen years, at least five times a week. But it's getting more and more frustrating. I'm not frustrated because it wastes time. I have the time to post because I make the time to post. It's frustrating because it's happening more often and I feel like the new ideas aren't as reachable as they have been in the past. Maybe I'm blogging too often. If I blogged less, I'd be able to create more thoughtful content and have more time to create posts like that. Perhaps if I cut down to blogging four days a week, I could do that. This is just a thought right now. I've prided myself on blogging as often as I can (because I need to write). And if there are people out there who read this with their morning coffee every day, well, ...