A Completely Unrelated Series of Thoughts.. Part 5

[TraderJake]

My last day of work.

Retiring already? 

More like my boss (well really I have no boss, but this is the person I generally report to) is going to a different firm (one I also would like to coop for, and would have taken a job there had a senior not gotten the job instead of me). So yeah, I am not going back to my current employer, and yeah I am not going to have much to do in the coming weeks.

[Hydrobond]

This isn't worth a new thread, because it's an old artacle and because I stole it from DP, but I love this story and wanted to share it.

Bested

I don't know who you are, but I know you're out there.

Was that you who just passed me, walking out as I was walking in? Maybe you were here this morning. Maybe you were already here yesterday.

I've had good, no, GREAT luck thrifting in and around Oklahoma City. There are dozens of thrift stores within a very short drive of my house, and I've found great finds at every one of them. I guess the retro-craze never fully made its way to the Midwest, at least on the scale that it has taken over both coasts. I quit buying $5 Sega Genesis consoles and $10 NES systems simply because I got tired of it. It was too easy. A slow day for me at the thrift stores was one where I didn't find at least five or ten things to buy. I've picked up several SMS, Genesis, NES, SNES and PSX consoles as well as several classic computers for practically nothing, just because they were there.

But now, now there is another.

Over the past couple of months I've watched my watering holes slowly dry up. Thrift stores that used to have plentiful piles of Atari 2600 games now have been replaced with all-too-familiar stacks of Super Mario Brothers/Duck Hunt cartridges for the NES. Working consoles and game controllers have been replaced by ratty old computers and broken flight sticks. The fact that all my sources dried up overnight has to be more than a coincidence. Something a bit more sinister is afoot; someone else is buying my stuff.

Over the past couple of years, I wanted it all, and I wanted it bad. Like clockwork, I'd make my way around the city from store to store, searching for treasure. Routes became second nature. If I got off the interstate at Macarthur, stopping at the thrift store there was mandatory … which lead to the store off of 23rd and Macarthur, which is only a mile northeast of the store at 16th and Meridian, which is in itself a mile south of the store at 23rd and Meridian. I had every thrift store, pawn shop, and game store listed in the phone book written down in my Palm Pilot, sorted by address. No matter where I was in town or what I was doing, I could tell you the closest treasure trove. My lunches, for the most part, either led me to the corner of SW44th and Penn (home to not one but two great thrift stores), or further south to 74th and Penn, where a thrift store sits next door to a GameXchange. On more than one occasion, I spent my lunch hour visiting all four locations. My wife was growing tired of hearing me say “it'll just take five minutes!” every time we drove past a store on my list. Getting around in town was taking forever!

And so, I cut back. Instead of hitting my spots on Macarthur every day, I started hitting them once a week on Wednesdays (the day I don't carpool to work with my wife). I quit getting up early on Saturday mornings just to “make the rounds”. I quit buying every single thing I could find (“Why do you need yet another Commodore 64 disk drive?” my wife once asked me. “Are you going to buy every one of them you ever find for the rest of your life?”). So yeah, I cut back. And someone caught me slipping.

Somebody out there is hungrier than I am. Someone wants it more than I do (or at least did). Someone is beating me to the punch, beating me at my own game. By the time I get there, it's too late. The treasure is gone.

So now when I stop by the thrift stores, I'm not just looking for games -- I'm looking for you. Was that you, the teenage boy who walked out when I was walking in, scouring MY stores for ancient relics to sell on eBay? Or maybe you're the 30-something woman, searching for videogames from her childhood. Maybe you're buying games to trade in at one of the multiple used game chains that have popped up all over town; worse yet, maybe you're an employee or even an owner of one of those stores, buying everything on the cheap so you can repackage it and resell it.

I've been bested -- maybe not by somebody younger, or quicker, or richer, but definitely by someone more determined. As I look around my game room and admire the stacks upon stacks of games I haven't even got around to playing yet, I'd say I did okay.

So to you, whoever you are, let me give you a little advice. Don't sleep late. Don't get soft. Don't give up the race. When you do, rest assured there will be someone right behind you, waiting to take up the slack. Maybe it'll be someone even younger, quicker or richer than you are.

Or maybe it'll be me.

Or maybe he already got all the good stuff and there was nothing left for anybody.
The mid-west is too large.  It needs to be broken up into the plains states and the lake states.

[SFS]

I played a game of cat and mouse tonight. A serious game of cat and mouse. I won. I won becuase I am ready for it. They haven't made enough guns to kill me.

[Rejinx]

I played a game of cat and mouse tonight. A serious game of cat and mouse. I won. I won becuase I am ready for it. They haven't made enough guns to kill me.

  sounds like some gangsta stuff

[SFS]

Somebody out there is hungrier than I am. Someone wants it more than I do (or at least did).

I'm not a game collector.  I don't really collect anything.  But there is one thing that I told my self that pertains to this.  That if I want something, there will never be anyone who is hungrier than me.

I played a game of cat and mouse tonight. A serious game of cat and mouse. I won. I won becuase I am ready for it. They haven't made enough guns to kill me.

  sounds like some gangsta stuff

I used to have to sleep with a gun under my bed, but not anymore.

[Ando]

I used to have to sleep with a gun under my bed, but not anymore.

What, did you used to live in Mississippi?
OHHH, BURN!
..For Mississippi, not yourself.

[TraderJake]

I played a game of cat and mouse tonight. A serious game of cat and mouse. I won. I won becuase I am ready for it. They haven't made enough guns to kill me.

Bah, you almost live in the sticks, like any homies could actually find your homestead.

[The Metamorphosing Leon]

I used to have to sleep with a gun under my bed, but not anymore.

Finally got that shoulder holster eh?

[captain_nintendo]

wassup

[The Metamorphosing Leon]

Haven't you got anything a little more exciting to say captain? At least you can complain about your day like the rest of us do.

[Izret101]

w00t i am at work
:-p

[James]

w00t i am a nerd!

Phnargh phnar phnar phnar.


Is it wrong that I find Revenge of the Nerds very funny?

[captain_nintendo]

Haven't you got anything a little more exciting to say captain? At least you can complain about your day like the rest of us do.

Yes, but I posted at work. And thus, I havent had any free time at all at work in the last few months

I did feel like pile driving a certain music teacher today But thats about it.

[Alabama-Shrimp]

I finally saw the Kramer video today and looked like he was high as a kite. I couldn't believe my eyes & ears. Like they said, it was wrong and highly uncalled for. I saw the video and a whole bunch of altered footage on youtube.

Bullshit, don't let the press make up your mind for you.

It was perfectly well called for. If you're getting heckled you should be able to yell back. Look at how the Roman senate operated.

And the fact that these stupid words are still associated with racism is for the most part because of these fucking black racist "ministers" who want to make money in lawsuits. Race wouldn't be half the problem if these nutjobs would sit down. These "leaders of the black race" need to forget about it. There shouldn't be "a black race." We should all be people.

What if it had been a black guy calling a white guy a "cracker ass bitch"? Well first of all it never would have surfaced and secondly people would have said "Oh, those crazy black guys. That white dude got told" and that would have been the end of it.

I'm going to drop kick Al Sharpton in his fucking face for being one of the biggest racists in this country.

Have to agree an excellent point, have seen a very similar thing on the news today here in England.

140 Police staff (officers and civilians) have been disciplined for receiving opening and sending on an email with pictures of a black man who while running away from the Police in America jumped off a bridge and decapitated himself. (you may have seen the pics they have been on the net for years).

now this might be a bit bad seeing as they all work for the Police BUT the news decided to ask was it raciest because it was a black person dead and of course the "black police officers association" or what ever they are called and "black leaders" have said it was and that all involved should have been fired.

Er why? so what what colour he was why should that even matter? and again the same point would it have even been news if it was a person of any other colour? It seams today that with one hand we have people telling us we should get along but with the other they are slapping us for being diffrent??






(OK im shit at writhing but hopefully you know what i mean)

[Hydrobond]

People need thicker skin.

And less incentive to sue.