Selling some comics on eBay

I haven’t sold anything on eBay in a long time. The last time, I think, was in 2008, when I sold some video games. So that’s a little more than ten years.

I just recently put together a pile of about two dozen trade paperback and hardcover graphic novels that I want to get rid of. I’d gotten to the point where my accumulation of completed graphic novels was getting a bit out of hand, and I really needed to clear up some space.

I initially thought about giving them away to charity, but I thought they were probably worth too much to just dump them on Goodwill, and I couldn’t find a comics-specific charity that I thought could make good use of them. Then, I thought about selling them all at once to a dealer, but I didn’t think I’d get much money out of that, or even get that much interest from anyone.

So I, somewhat reluctantly, decided to go with eBay. Since it had been so long since I’d sold anything there, I had to figure out how things work nowadays. There used to be a couple of freeware or shareware programs you could use to easily set up a bunch of listings and upload them all at once to eBay, but it doesn’t seem like any of those are around anymore. There are some web-based services that help large sellers manage their inventory and auctions, but they’re not really for guys like me who are just posting a handful of items, and not making a living running an eBay store.

I initially tried to set up the listings using eBay’s mobile app. The app lets you scan UPC codes, then tries to find a matching item, and sets up a listing for that item that you can customize. For me, I think that was a waste of time. It only found about half of my books. I went ahead and saved those as drafts, intending to clean them up on my desktop PC and post them. But I found that they were mostly miscategorized and fairly useless. By the time I was done cleaning them up, I would have been better off starting from scratch.

Well, anyway, I was working on these listings on and off all day, and I’m finally done. I have two dozen books up on eBay now. You can find them all on my eBay user page. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of interest I get. Listings are free now (up to 50 a month), so it doesn’t cost me anything if nothing sells.

I also have some more manga volumes I want to get rid of. I might dig those out and list them tomorrow, if I have time. After that, if things seem to be going well, I’d like to get rid of some individual comic books, probably by selling them in sets.

It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t go to Garden State Comic Fest last month, and that I’m not going to San Diego Comic Con this year. At either show, I probably would have brought home a bunch of new comics and books that I don’t have time to read, nor space to store! (Oh, and, holy cow, SDCC starts next week! I didn’t realize it was so soon!)

MoMA closing and related museum stuff

MoMA shut down for renovations in June, and will be closed until late in October. I still have a MoMA membership, but hadn’t gotten in to see it much lately, so I really wanted to see it once before it closed. I made it in, on June 15, the last day that they were open to the general public. (June 16 was a “member day,” and I wanted to go in for that too, but didn’t make it.) I’m glad I went in. The museum was pretty crowded, but it was fun.

The Times had a few good articles about the closing, including this general overview, which links to a few other articles. This one about staring at Starry Night for 30 minutes is light (and mostly pointless) but kind of fun. And this one, where the Times talked to a bunch of random people who were in the museum on the last day, is also pretty good. I identify with the guy from NJ who says “I’ll sit in front of a Pollock for 20 minutes.” Me too!

I’ve been curious about what they’re going to do with some of their more famous works while the museum is closed. I’ve had no luck in finding any information about that online though. Starry Night, in particular, seems like something that probably shouldn’t just go into storage for four months. I thought maybe they’d loan it out to another museum, but I’ve found no indication of that. (There’s an exhibit called Van Gogh and Britain at the Tate in London right now, and it has Starry Night over the Rhone, but that’s not the same as Starry Night. Looks like a great exhibit though!)

Or I thought maybe they’d set up a mini-MoMA pop-up at MoMA PS1, but they’re not doing that either. The Frick will be moving into the Breuer building while they’re closed for renovations, in 2020. I kind of thought maybe MoMA would do something like that, with PS1 or another space somewhere, but I guess not.

I also haven’t gotten in to the Met in while. I’m interested in their new exhibit Apollo’s Muse, which is an exhibit about the moon, tied in to the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. (There’s probably a bunch of cool stuff going on related to that anniversary. I should do some more internet searching and make some plans.)

Neon Genesis Evangelion

A lot of Evangelion references have been cropping up in my Twitter feed lately, and I (initially) wasn’t sure why. Well, it’s because Netflix just added it, and that’s kind of a big deal, because it hasn’t been (legally) available in the US since 2009 or thereabouts. I have the series on DVD, and finished watching it in 2003. (It originally came out, in Japan, in 1995.) I’ve occasionally thought about doing a re-watch, but have never gotten around to it. Nor have I gotten around to buying and/or watching any of the follow-up movies.

Maybe I should re-watch it on Netflix now. I just read a few of the recent articles about it, and I’m kind of curious what I’d think about it, at this point in my life. Would it make more sense? Less sense? Would it seem smarter? Dumber? Prescient? Outdated? I don’t know.

Here are some links to a few of the more interesting or useful articles I found:

  • Polygon has an article on the right way to watch the series. (In a nutshell: watch the original series. Don’t try to start with the movies.)
  • Quartz has an article that’s mostly about how the series resonates today: “Neon Genesis Evangelion is a classic 1995 Japanese animated series that takes place in a future that is already our past, the year 2015. Yet it has never been more relevant.”
  • The New Yorker has a short article that talks a bit about the theme of the man/machine relationship in Evangelion. (If you told me in 2003 that someday I’d be reading a serious article about Evangelion in the New Yorker, I would not have believed you.)
  • The Verge has an article calling Evangelion the “perfect story for this moment in history.” It talks a bit about the theme of “the Hedgehog’s Dilemma” and ties it to our current social/political climate. It’s a pretty smart take on the show, I think.
  • Finally, Polygon has a really great long article by Aaron Stewart-Ahn that goes into the history of the show, specifically in relation to Hideaki Anno’s “lifelong struggles with depression and alienation.” This one is definitely worth reading.

I have so much other stuff on my “want to watch” list that it probably doesn’t make sense for me to re-watch Evangelion right now, but I’m really tempted. I’ve been in the kind of mood lately where watching something like Eva might be either a very good or very bad idea. I’m not sure.

Xbox follow-up

Now that I’ve had my Xbox for a few weeks, I thought I should post a follow-up. I’m mostly using it to play Bejeweled, to be honest. I played Mass Effect for about a half-hour, and haven’t gotten back to it. Ditto for Stardew Valley. I want to get back to both of those, but right now, War and Peace is more of a draw for me. It helps that I can read War and Peace outside, or at work, or on the train. It’s been nice out the last few weekends, so I’ve been sitting outside on Division Street and reading a lot. (Can’t do that with an Xbox.) I’m about 25% of the way through War and Peace.

It’s funny, if you look at a site like How Long To Beat, a lot of modern video games take about as long to complete as it takes to read War and Peace. (According to my Kindle, it’s maybe a 40-50 hour book.) I won’t look down on or argue with anyone who chooses to play the Mass Effect trilogy over reading War and Peace, but I think I’ve turned into more of a War and Peace kind of guy as I’ve gotten older.

And since E3 is done, maybe I should take a moment to review the Xbox news out of that show.

  • Everybody continues to push into subscriptions, including Microsoft, with the new Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, for $15/month. I guess that’s great if you play a ton of games, but it’s definitely not for me.
  • The next gen Xbox looks interesting, and should be out near the end of 2020. Given that I seem to gravitate towards games like Bejeweled and Stardew Valley, that don’t exactly push the current gen hardware, I’m not likely to jump on the next gen bandwagon any time soon.
  • I’m glad to see that the next gen Xbox will continue to support backwards compatibility with older games, from the original Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. The headline in the linked article says “Microsoft ends Xbox backward compatibility,”  but that’s a little misleading. The article itself says that “Microsoft is winding down new additions to its Xbox backward compatibility catalog,” and “Microsoft is now committing to get every Xbox One game running on Scarlett, alongside games from all four generations of Xbox.” So that should be cool, and a good reason to (eventually) buy a next gen Xbox.

On a somewhat related topic, I enjoyed this article on the “slow death of the strategy guide”. It’s an excerpt from this book, which is currently just $3.82 for the Kindle version, so might be worth picking up. I’ve got strategy guides for a bunch of games, including several that I never got around to playing. Some of them are pretty cool, with lots of art and screenshots. Some people consider using strategy guides as cheating, but I always found that they added to my enjoyment of a game, making it easier for me to keep track of where I was, how the game worked, and whether or not I was on the right track. Generally, they helped me manage the more annoying stuff without getting in the way of the fun stuff. Since most games don’t even come with an instruction manual anymore, I wish more of them had good official (or unofficial) hard-copy strategy guides available. But I guess there’s not much of a market for that anymore.

no more iTunes and too much Main St music

Somebody thought it would be a good idea to start playing music here on Main St again, for the summer, and again it’s gone horribly wrong. Well, maybe not horribly wrong, but I woke up to bad jazz coming in through my window at 4 AM this morning, so pretty wrong. I stayed in bed until about 4:30, when the switch from bad jazz to yacht rock occurred, at which point I gave up and got out of bed. So now I’ve got an extra hour or so to kill before I have to go to work, so I might as well do some blogging.

I’ve been running across a lot of articles this week about the end of iTunes. Some of them are quite overblown and even misleading. Here’s one that isn’t. Key line: “For the most part, the end of iTunes seems to be an end in name only: key features will be retained in the Music app.” (And iTunes for Windows is sticking around for now too.) Here’s a FAQ-style article from CNET that’s also fairly useful and not misleading.

There are a lot of think pieces out there that are mostly following the same narrative. Here’s one from The Verge. The general structure of most of these goes through the rise of iPods, ripping CDs, pirating music through Napster, and buying 99¢ songs through iTunes, then the decline of that model and the rise of streaming music. I can’t argue with any of that, though I’m still not that keen on switching over to a $10/month streaming service.

Depending on how usable the new Apple Music app actually is, I may need to go back to my search for a good alternative music management system. Back in 2017, I had an issue that prompted me to look around. I tried Swinsian on my Mac and MediaMonkey on my PC, but wasn’t happy enough with either of them to stick with them. The issue I had with iTunes eventually got fixed, so I stuck with iTunes.

I’m actually getting a lot of my music these days from podcasts and streaming radio. I’m listening to Monday Graveyard and Future Astronauts regularly, and enjoying both. (And supporting both on Patreon, though for only a buck a month.) And right at this moment, I’m listening to some nice stuff on NTS. (The description of the show I’m listening to right now starts with “Exploring long-form structures and expressive micro-tuning systems…”, so yeah, it’s that kind of music! It’s these guys, apparently.)

I occasionally consider signing up for a streaming music service, though I still can’t talk myself into it. Amazon Music Unlimited would probably be the cheapest, at $8/month for Prime members. (I’m wondering about that price now though, since the page linked above currently shows two “Try It” buttons, one of which says $7.99/month under it, while the other says $9.99/month. And I saw an even higher price in a popup in the iOS app yesterday. So I don’t know what’s going on there.) Anyway, my taste is weird enough right now that I’m probably better off sticking with oddball podcasts, streaming radio stations, and an occasional Bandcamp purchase.

Well, it’s around 6:45 AM now, so it’s still a bit too early to go to work. Maybe I should go for a walk.

 

War and Peace

I started reading War and Peace this month, as a group read for the Great American Read Goodreads group I’m in. I’ve also been running the group for the last month or two, since the original moderator took a break. So I’ve done a bit of internet research on the book, in preparation for reading it, and so I could share it with the group. So I might as well also share it here, and mark the point where I started reading. Then, assuming I finish, I can write another blog post at the end.

I’ve allocated two months for reading it (June and July), which is probably a bit optimistic. But that’s more about not tying up the Goodreads group for three or four months on one book than it is about how long it takes to read War and Peace. I imagine we’ll start a new group read in August, but I expect I’ll still be working on War and Peace through to Labor Day, at least.

I’m reading this Kindle version, which was free when I bought it, but now seems to be 99¢. It includes an excerpt from a book called Give War And Peace A Chance, which might be worth reading also. The translation is by Aylmer and Louise Maude, done in the 1920’s, I think. Comparing it to bits of other translations that I’ve looked at, I think it may be the most accessible to a casual American reader. And it’s apparently in the public domain, since it’s the version available at Project Gutenberg.

When I get into something like this, I often overdo the research, and sometimes go into a weird mode where I also start buying related stuff. In this case, I’ve also bought the BBC radio dramatization of the book from 2014 and the BBC TV miniseries, from 2016, both from Apple/iTunes. I thought that seeing/hearing the characters might help me keep them straight. I’ve started listening to the radio version, and it’s pretty good. The TV mini-series inspired a few good articles at The Guardian, such as this 10 things you need to know article and this could you read War and Peace in a week bit.

Hardware in, hardware out

OK, here’s one more Xbox follow-up post (previous). The vertical stand was delivered on Memorial Day. I was kind of surprised about that, since (1) it’s a holiday, and (2) all the streets around my apartment are closed off on Memorial Day for the big bike race. But, somehow, the Amazon delivery guy found somewhere to park, then schlepped a box full of packages down Main Street. He hit my apartment building right as I was about to go out and wander around a little. If he’d shown up five minutes later, I would have missed him. (It’s possible someone would have let him into the building though, since one of my neighbors was hanging out right in front of the building watching the race.) So, again, it would have been more convenient for everyone if Amazon just used the USPS, but it’s fine.

I promised myself several years ago that I wouldn’t bring in any new tech without getting rid of an equivalent amount of old tech. So I took some time today to get rid of a bunch of stuff. There’s a monthly electronics recycling drop-off for my county, in Hillsborough, so I went over there today with a bunch of stuff. I got rid of:

  • an old HP desktop PC (with the drives removed),
  • an old Toshiba HD-DVD player,
  • a very old VCR,
  • my Dad’s old Sony CD changer,
  • my old MacBook (with the drive removed),
  • an old Apple TV,
  • an old Roku box,
  • an old Samsung tablet,
  • and my old Automatic adapter.

So I guess I’m officially giving up on a few things, like ever watching a VHS video tape or an HD-DVD again. I think I really need to purge my CD collection soon too. I have way too many CDs, and they’re not organized really well. Honestly, I have a lot of stuff to purge, but I’ll save that for another post.

Back to the Xbox: After saying that I wasn’t going to sign up for any subscription services, I went ahead and signed up for a year of EA Access. It’s only $30. I will probably go in and turn off recurring billing on it, to force myself to make a decision about it in a year, rather than letting it auto-renew. I downloaded Mass Effect and Bejeweled 3, but that’s it so far.

Honestly, I’ve been playing Bejeweled more than anything else. I think I first played Bejeweled on my Toshiba e310, which would have been in 2002 or thereabouts. (I could be wrong; it might have been on one of my Palm units. Either way, I remember it being grayscale, and playing with a stylus.) It seems kind of silly to use an Xbox One for something that ran fine on a handheld in 2002, but, hey, I like playing it.

I’ve also started playing Stardew Valley. That’s interesting so far, but I’m not convinced it’s as great as a bunch of people seem to think. I may need to give it some time to grow on me.

I’ve also committed myself to reading War and Peace this summer, so that may cut into my video gaming a bit. Either way, I should have more than enough stuff to keep me busy this summer.

More Xbox silliness

OK, here’s another post nobody needs, in my continuing series about unnecessarily buying an Xbox One.

First, on the subject of Amazon’s hapless delivery system: I still don’t have the vertical stand for my Xbox, but Amazon made one more delivery attempt last night. Around 9:15pm, I got a call from a number that Verizon’s Call Filter identified as “possible spam,” so I dismissed it. But a few seconds later, I got a text message from somebody identifying himself as an Amazon delivery driver named Luigi, asking how to get into my building. So I’m guessing the call I rejected was also from him. I texted back, saying that I could let him in, if he was here, but then I got nothing further back, other than a presumably automated message saying that my order couldn’t be delivered. Now I see at least three things wrong with this: (1) having people out delivering packages at 9:15pm on a Saturday night, (2) sharing my cell phone # with random delivery drivers, and (3) said delivery drivers calling and texting me, and then not bothering to wait around for an answer. It’s possible that item 2 isn’t really an issue; they may route the calls/texts through an app that doesn’t actually expose my number to the driver. Still, I don’t recall agreeing to be contacted on my cell # at all for this stuff. (But I’m sure I did at some point. Nobody reads the terms and conditions anymore…)

On to the Xbox itself: I’ve got the thing set up, and I’ve mostly figured out how to use it. (As I’ve sometimes joked in the past, this means that my job is now done, and I can stop using it. This tends to happen to me with consumer electronics. Figuring out the user interface is more fun for me than actually playing games.) I’ve bought just one game: Lumines Live, which is one of the old “backwards compatibility” games, and cost $5. This is definitely not a game that shows off the Xbox One at all, but I was a big fan of the original Lumines game on PSP.  It’s still a fun game, and it was worth $5, I guess.

There are multiple subscription services available on the Xbox that you can sign up for, including XBox Live Gold,  Game Pass, and EA Access. I don’t really want to sign up for any of them, but I’m starting to waver. In looking around for some cheap games to buy, I thought about maybe buying the original Mass Effect trilogy. Mass Effect 2 and 3 are currently on sale for $6 each via the current Xbox backwards compatibility sale. But Mass Effect 1 isn’t. I think that’s because it’s included with Game Pass, so they don’t sell it separately, maybe? Anyway, only ME 1 is included with Game Pass, but all three are included with EA Access. Also, I can pick up dodgy-looking used copies of ME 1, 2, and 3 from my local GameStop, or from a used game store that’s about a block away from my apartment. That would cost about $5 per game. So I don’t know. This is one of those things where I have too many options and I never manage to make a decision. The backwards compatibility sale ends tomorrow, so if I’m going to buy ME 2 and 3 that way, I should go ahead and do it. I don’t want to sign up for Game Pass or EA Access, because I’ll probably either lose interest in the games or get too busy to do any gaming about a week after I sign up. The smart thing to do would be to sign up for a month of Game Pass, play ME 1 for however long it takes me to get tired of it, then cancel it.

I’m going to start reading War and Peace next week, as part of a Goodreads group read, so I should really just give up on the idea of playing video games. I think that will keep me busy enough. (And the Kindle version was free!)

over-promising and under-delivering

At this point, my Xbox-related blogging is getting a little ridiculous. (But here I go again, anyway.)

The Xbox I ordered from Amazon yesterday was supposed to show up today, which I was kind of excited about. I don’t generally expect one-day shipping from Amazon, but it’s cool that they’ve been trying to do it lately. I say “trying” because two of the items in my order (the Xbox and the HDMI switch) changed over to two-day at some point today, so they should be here tomorrow. And the one item that was still scheduled for today (the stand) now says “Unfortunately we had trouble finding your address.” Which is, of course, nonsense. There is no way anyone could have trouble finding my address. So, hopefully that’ll be here tomorrow too, unless the delivery exception causes it to get stuck in limbo (which has happened before). So anyway, that’s another story to add to my Amazon delivery shenanigans file. I wish Amazon would either straighten this stuff out, or stop over-promising and under-delivering on their Prime shipping stuff. Just let the good old USPS deliver my packages. They do a pretty good job!

So, back to actual Xbox stuff. I spent some time today browsing the internet, looking for stuff about Xbox games that I might want to try. I’m interested in the backwards compatibility that the Xbox One has with previous Xbox models. Here’s a recent article from Polygon about some good older games that work with Xbox One. And here’s an older blog post from Scott Hanselman, diving into some old games from the backwards compatibility list. (I always wonder how Hanselman has time for video games, given all the other stuff he does. I’m thinking either he doesn’t sleep, or there are two of him.) There’s a big sale on the backwards compatible stuff going on right now, apparently. And there’s some good information about backward compatibility on Major Nelson’s site.

Of course, I’ve never owned an Xbox before, so I don’t have any old games to transfer over to my Xbox One, but I’d like to dig into some of the games I’ve heard a lot about over the years but never got to play. The lack of backwards compatibility is actually one of the main reasons why I never picked up a PS4. (My PS3 can play PS1 and PS2 games, and I’ve used it more for those than for PS3 games, honestly.)

I bought an Xbox

Sigh. I’m going to call this post the third part of my “Xbox denial trilogy”. (First part here and second part here.) I gave up and ordered an Xbox from Amazon today, along with a vertical stand and an HDMI switch. It should all arrive tomorrow, because Amazon is now using some kind of magic shipping method that can get pretty much anything to my door in one day. I think they use the Floo Network or Portkeys or something. Anyway, the Xbox was marked down to $208, the stand was $10, and the HDMI switch was $33.

I could have gotten a cheaper HDMI switch, but Kinivo seems to have a good reputation, and I didn’t want to get an iffy one. I only have three HDMI ports on my TV, and I’m currently using them all (TiVo, Apple TV, and PS3). I’ll probably put the PS3 and Xbox on the switch. The Xbox has an HDMI IN port, so there’s probably some way I could have used it as a pass-thru, and avoided having to get a switch, but that didn’t seem like a good idea.

It’s possible that the Xbox One S is getting marked down so much because Microsoft is going to announce a new Xbox at E3 in June. I won’t be disappointed if they do. I’m not a big enough gamer to care that much about having the very latest console. (And it’ll probably cost $500, which I can’t really justify.)

So I’ll now have a console that can play current-generation games. Most of the really popular Xbox games don’t really appeal to me, but there are a bunch of oddball indie games that I’m kind of interested in. I guess I’ll need to figure out the deal with Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass. I don’t think I want to sign up for either of them, but I don’t know.

This Xbox may just wind up gathering dust, but hopefully I can get enough use out of it to justify having spent about $250 for it (including the accessories).