Do you collect anything? How did you start?

Comic books. I learned to read when I was 2, but there wasn't a ton of reading material for 2 year olds.

Back then, comic books were only a quarter and soooo... 52 years later...

The big one:

I also run the comic books community on lemmy.world. Pop by and say hello!

Steam library

I collect hobbies.

I collect unfinished projects.

I don't understand "collecting"

Don't get me wrong, there are a few categories of things I have a lot of, like film cameras, but that's because I started with cheaper ones, and kept getting better ones as I became more sure that film photography was a thing I wanted to do.

But, for instance, I have friends who collect MLB bobbleheads just for the sake of collecting, and I'll never understand that.

My wife and I collect souvenir lapel pins from places we travel to. We write the date on the back, and keep them in a shadow box on the wall in chronological order.

It's nice as it's not very expensive to buy them, and they don't take up a lot of space to keep, and we have a nice little history of our travels at a glance.

Vinyl records. I like to own copies of music I like. It's much more satisfying to go through and find something to listen to.

Bottle openers from breweries I go to. Fairly small and they have by the bar. I don't drink as much beer as I used to so that's slowing down.

I collect games I do not play lol

Fountain pens and inks. Nothing like enjoying the mere act of writing meeting notes with my preferred pen, ink, and paper.

A5 Clairefontaine 90gsm, and usually Pilot Iroshizuku Tsutsiji.

It is the perfect color to be appropriate for signatures and the like, while also being interesting and having the tiniest bit of sheen.

Haven’t used a Bic in ages, I just fill pens as needed.

Got a safari in F that’s perfect for tsutsiji and I just keep filling it.

Yeah, FP are my “thing”, helped along by the insane vari lets of available inks. If I sign something [wet], it’s with a fifteen dollar safari and that ink, or on (diamine) Sherwood green.

Anything else, and it’s not my sig.

I like to collect mugs - nothing better than drinking your morning coffee from a crazy mug :))

I collect mugs with my boyfriend (and the rest of my collective) and it is such a nice hobby. I can almost always guess who brought the mug into the house, based on people's interest.

Yesterday I drank coffe from a Friday the 13th Mug and I know one of my collectivists loves that series :))

the only issue, as with all collections, it takes up so much room in the kitchen 🥲

Carnaval Emblems! In the province of Noord-Brabant, Netherlands it is customary to decorate your carnaval coat or "boerenkiel" (farmer's coat?) with emblems from carnaval events or clubs.

I started because I completely fell in love with carnaval! Below is an example of such a traditional "boerenkiel".

I have a 15,000 card Magic: The Gathering collection. Some years I’m into it, some years it just sits in boxes. I used to make some money trading them but it’s more effort than my usual work. It’s nice to get them out sometimes and go through them, lots of good memories.

Tiger R-Zone games, and the consoles. It’s a nice collection, because the library is pretty small.

As far as I know, I’ve got one of the most-complete, if not the most-complete collections out there, and one day I’d like to donate it to an archive or museum for caretaking. At this point, the only confirmed game I’m missing is the incredibly rare soccer game (“Football”, as it was sold—and rightfully so).

The system brought me a lot of joy as a kid, despite its simplicity, and I think the difficulty to collect it makes it easy to be forgotten to history.

"Ooo... This is neat. I want it."

"Ooo... That one is neat too. I want it."

Bam! Now you're a collector.

Nintendo 64 games.
It was the first game console I really played much of growing up. I'd go to my dads on the weekends and he had it there, so it was this magical time, playing Ocarina of Time and Mario Kart 64. I've collected nearly all the games I grew up with, as well as some I never played as a kid. I like having it, knowing that at any time I can play them, in their original forms on hardware. Emulation is great but playing on hardware just hits different.

I collect vintage computers. I have a bunch of laptops from 2000 and earlier, as well as an Atari 800xl, an emachine, and a ti 99/4a. The reason I started was because when I started studying computer science, I fell in love with the history of computing

I seem to be collecting vintage lenses. I stared by getting an adapter for my mirrorless camera and I just fell in love with the lovely character their 'flaws' give them.

I collect decks of cards from different countries/places. Usually if someone from my family/friend circle travels just buys me one at the airport of that country, but I also have a few special ones, like the Norwegian Ice Hotel, or a spicy sexy one from Greece.

It started randomly, I realized that I have 3-4 decks from random places and that was it, I became a collector.

You could say I collect websites (kind of). I have the world record for the most sites having signed up for. It just sort of happened and then it stuck through maintenance.

I have a small collection of Lego sets. I mainly collect the minifigure-scale Star Wars space ships (yes, I have the crazy big Millenium Falcon), but only original trilogy ships. My wife collects the big Lego Creator cars.

I began collecting dwarf trees. They typically range in max height no larger than 12 ft. But most are under 2 feet.

As a kid, we were so poor, it was scary. I remember living in a car, having to choose between going hungry or eating food that was past its prime, and learning Santa wasn't real too young (I couldn't understand why my friends got expensive dream gifts... I thought I had been good)

After going through all that and my mom overdosing, I started collecting things that would accumulate value or were an investment. Comic books and figurines are my go to, but I've also got machines for creating cosplays (as that's my career now). I won't buy anything that I can't pawn off in an emergency to survive, or use it to make money. I really should have been collecting coins/gold/silver, but I picked what was fun.

Also, shoutout to my elementary school's lunch lady, who noticed a tiny, thin girl using the free lunch program, and offered her seconds, after everyone else had been served. I don't think she knows how much she touched my life.

I collect magnets of places I’ve visited. I have two collections: one is upstairs on a magnetic chalkboard and it’s only amusement parks (along with my scratch-off map of parks) and the other is downstairs on the fridge and it’s a random mix of cities, states, countries, and attractions.

I collect ttrpgs! I love reading how mechanics work together and I've never found value in collecting things I don't use, so ttrpgs it is. Plus there are some really wild ones out there that are fun to look at. It started with 3.5/Pathfinder but eventually I branched out to a couple other games that I like to play. I spend the most effort on my Car Wars collection, think I'm going to try getting a complete set of ADQ on that front next.

My single prized book so far though is a copy of HōL's supplement buttery wholesomeness. Specifically the second printing of it with the cover that's written like BUTTery HOLsomeness which ended up being so hard to track down over like 5 years that I started to question if it even had a physical printing or if it was just in PDF form. Finally found the thing though last year

Flashlights, especially customized "Hanklights". I've stopped for now because it's hard to justify buying more at this point.

House and techno vinyl records - got about 800 or so and always on the lookout for more.

Also, home shirts (and some away) for my football team, Dunfermline Athletic - got every home top going back to 1986.

Star Trek playmates figures from the 90s.

A completionist's nightmare.

I'm almost there. 29 to go.

Nah, I don't.

But yes, I also do need all these board games. 😛

(I got ~80 of them, was once >100 but I started selling more I never get to the table off. Still fills 6x4 Kallax spaces. Started uuuuh... about 20 years ago, buying Alhambra, the Spiel des Jahres 2003 at the Spiel 2003 in Essen. Since then been an avid board gamer.)

Pocket knives, and Swiss army knives in particular. I've loved them since I was given my first one as a child, which was the impetus for me to stop biting my nails.

I like to collect “hacked” retro consoles. It’s so cool to see them in action and what people were able to do with them.

I used to collect movies on DVD/Bluray but kinda fell out of love with it thanks to streaming, taking up room and being annoying when moving places. They are not worth anything so I don’t want to go through the trouble of selling, so I’m throwing away the cases and put the discs in CD organizers to make them more compact. Most of the labels got sunbleached anyways.

It’s a bit sad. I mean some films are not and will never be available on streaming but overall this became just a nuisance.

I collect all kinds of things! Vintage trading cards, vinyl records, comic books, pocket knives, old photos come to mind! I've scaled back somewhat in the last few years, but I like to add to them every now and then

Boarding passes. I fly a lot as part of the job, and in the beginning I kept them so I could register the air miles if they didn't tick in automatically. Then it became an archive of every air travel. Then it became a stack that I just kept adding to. It is now ~15cm high.

My parents each had things they collected (Dad actually owned a comic shop at one point) so I grew up with the concept.

I personally have a small collection of year 2000 memorabilia. (Was an important year in my life, and I also spent it gathering knickknacks that mentioned it)

Not exactly a coherent collection of a specific thing, but I like to gather older video game consoles and retro tech to hook them all up in the most interesting way possible. I've currently got an SNES, N64, GameCube, and Sega Saturn hooked up to an old decent quality CRT security monitor over s-video. I plan to get an s-video matrix to hook up all the consoles at once and switch between them easier, and I also plan to at some point add a PS2, Xbox, and Dreamcast into the mix.

I might also at some point try to find an old early 2000s or even late 90s computer and hook that up too. I don't have a lot of space, so I might have to hook it up to the TV, but as long as it can play the games from my childhood without issue, I don't care what wonky setup I need. Old games just aren't as fun on an LCD.
I do probably need to degauss the CRT though. When I first picked it up it looked fine, but I ran a metal fan a little too close to it for too long and now it's got distorted geometry on that side.

So I suppose I collect retro electronics. I don't even collect games for the consoles I own. I just bought them for the fun of hooking them up.

I have an almost complete collection of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels. I'm missing about three of them published before Valhalla Rising, and I kinda lost track of how many he wrote after that. I was kinda into them in high school, and would pick them up for $6 or $8 here and there. Most are paperbacks, I bought them to read not to display (though like almost all books they sit on the shelf most of the time) and I would hardly call myself a "collector." But I own a thigh high stack of NUMA adventures.

I inherited a collection of prints from a relatively local artist called Ed Berger, who spent his working life as a civil engineer in Washington DC before moving to North Carolina to work on his artwork, much of which are kind of bleak and dreary landscapes focusing on old decrepit farm buildings, houses etc. I've got a dozen of them or so, the whole collection would sell at auction for almost $10.

Oh I forgot! I have a very small collection of T-shirts from theme parks I've visited throughout my life, usually one from my favorite ride in the park. My favorites among the collection are from Alpengeist at Busch Gardens Williamsburg, Maverick from Cedar Point and Fury 305 at Carowinds. I've been thinking of pulling down Ed Berger's "It sucked when it was new and now it's old" collection and framing those T-shirts, as I never wear them.

Would digital collection count? I've been collecting completed TV shows.

I guess you could say that I collect data. After Ally I need to use as the storage space for something. Don't worry, not personal data.

i used to collect rocks - agates, crystals, geodes, etc - but it can be an expensive hobby and you need to have room to display so I stopped.

"That'll be very handy in the future!"

I collect everything material-ish

Yes

It’s just a thing I do because my brain likes it

Guitar pedals. My collection is fairly modest (20-30 pedals) but I have some neat pieces, like a couple Japanese Boss pedals from the 80's. They are functional so I don't feel like it's a waste of space per se. Also they look cool, so there's that.

I started collecting knives which evolved into balisongs which I love to flip

Knives. I don't know why.

I started collecting digital album covers

Action figures, chef knives, Ramen, tinned seafood, winter coats, 4K blurays, keyboards are really tempting.

Playing cards. It started with me picking up a few decks because I liked the designs. My collection has grown over the last few years, but there is definitely room for more. If a deck looks cool and is reasonably priced it's an easy thing to pick up on a whim.

I have a lot of small bottles and vials waiting to be filled. It started decades ago when I found a quaint little glass tube with a stopper in an antique shop at my favorite beach town and thought it'd be nice to take home some sand from my favorite spot, thereafter becoming a tradition for subsequent visits. Now I pick one up whenever I see one to have a cache available for any future adventures.

I wouldn't call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I've been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I'd still have my games.

A few Theory11 playing card packs, because they're beautifully designed. Besides that, some Bicycle sets too.

I started collecting shot glasses when I was in my 20s. Somewhere in my 30s, I stopped. Now I collect shirts from 5k runs that I participated in.

Misery. I collect misery.

I thrift clothes! On top of that, I also curate digital media, like ebooks and music, for personal use. It's nice to curate and cull that which you don't like.

Besides stuff when traveling, I’d say tools. Yea I’ll totally use this on a future project, swipe

No, possessions are annoying to have, you just have to clean them, worry about them the more you have.