Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall

I used to keep coin cups, one per type of coin, so that I could sort the coins as I went. With my switch to other payment methods, I haven't been generating many coins, so I've recently decided to retire those cups.

One of the cups was a coffee cup, but not a mug. It's bone white and utilitarian, making it hard to date, but I'd say 50s-70s. It's really hard to nail down, and that sort of design was perennial.

I decided to keep this cup because of it's size. It's smaller compared to a mug, but not quite tiny. If you get coffee at a diner, it's that size. I like it because it enforces ideas of smallness.

It's also useful when measuring coffee. This is what everything means by a cup when they list cups. When I follow directions for one cup, and I use this cup, I get a balanced cup of coffee, not too weak and not too strong. Also, not too much.

Since I drink my coffee black, I don't have to leave any room for anything else, which also helps.

Once upon a time there were MP3 players, and now they're Digital Audio Players. There were lots of them. Most importantly, there were Sansa players, and they were little awesome beasts. They'd play forever and a day on no charge whatsoever.

Sadly, Sansa no longer makes their players.

I tried finding a use Sansa Clip, and there were almost no new old stock. The one that did appear, for $300, was identical to the one that I'm using now.

The use case, for me, is falling asleep to an audiobook. I need a player that is operable at night, will play for a while, and will then shut down of its own accord. If I can do all of this while not wearing glasses, that's all the better.

This new generation of MP3 players out of China don't have the same impressive lineage. It's hard to find one that plays for 20+ hours. None of them are meant for the English speaking audience, and I have a healthy suspicion about anything running a battery that's not guaranteed to meet US standards. Lousy batteries cause fires.

I may try using my old Android phone as an MP3 player. It's not my preference, as I'll roll over it, guaranteed, but it's free, has a good battery life, and meets US standards.

If I wanted a higher end player, that would be easy. There are enough of those, but I don't want to sleep on a high end player, only to find that my toy is now kaput.

Nicole Rudolph did a nice video on stuff, and how its often worthless and handed down.

The Millenial Inheritance Is Just Emotional Baggage

I've slowly become aware of this phenomena through Reddit. The modern form of it took place over my lifetime, so I saw it grow and develop, yet I hadn't noticed this change at all. Most of modern collecting culture happened away from me, so I had no real relationship to it. My family weren't collectors.

I recall watching Antiques Roadshow, and people finding out that their things were valuable. I was amused by that as nothing that I owned was valuable, nor would I inherit such a thing. My sole inheritance, to this point, after six decades, was my grandfather's pocket watch. It's a conversation piece at best.

My wife, however, received some furniture from a great aunt, which she lived with when I first met her. We didn't have room for it when we merged households, so she sold it at auction where it sold on the lower end of a reasonable price.

As a collector, I'm more of an accumulator. I've built collections of the years, but I eventually get bored of them and get rid of them. The hunt is always more fun than the having. I've also been interested in acquiring more collections over the years, but I only have so much space, and the collections are only of interest to myself. I may have a few valuable things, but they aren't that valuable as things go.

A while ago, I thought about doing auctions, and I saw the collections that they sold off, and I felt sorry for most of those people. Men collected in such a narrow, boring range, and the collections never sold for much.

Collecting as a profession is a skill, one that takes quite a bit of specialty self-education. That's an entirely different beast, but they count in the public idea of what a collection is. The amateur thinks that their collection can rival a pro, but they don't realize that their knowledge gap is so significantly huge. When I sold off my comics, collected in my 20's and sold in my 30's, I lost money. I enjoyed building the collection, but selling is its own complicated challenge. That's what makes a pro.

That brings us to today, and today's collecting culture that lives in its own collecting bubble. That idea that collecting leads to money is gone, as so many collections are timely, and the trends fade.

Collecting comes from the thrill of finding and locating. That's its core. We love the hunt and we love the success. Most collections are relatively cheap to acquire, common enough to find, yet uncommon enough that they require some effort. I think that most people still collect this way. We know that our collections are worth nothing, and I think that collecting is best this way.

It's no wonder then that so many people think that what they have automatically flows into what is valuable. They've seen that on TV for the last 30-40 years. It seems that collecting and antiquing was a trend, and now it's not trending, or better said, expressing itself in new ways and new areas. Yes, things may be valuable, but relatively speaking, they're not that valuable. Unless it's going for $100k, it's not going to be life changing money.

I've been musing a bit about the man-o-sphere lately. I'm making this public because I think that this is worth a discussion.

The man-o-sphere has been capturing many young men these days, and after reading many ideas about that, I'm left with one conclusion: the man-o-sphere is attracting young men because they correctly identify the problems that young men face and they legitimize those problems.

There's lots to unpack, so let's start by not unpacking.

If we are to reach these young men, to pull them in a better direction, then we have to begin by recognizing their problems and legitimizing those problems. It's that simple, and like all simple things, is far more complex than it looks.

Here's where you ask some very good and pointed questions, and they are legitimate and important questions, but here is also where you need to stop and ask, "What is my goal here?"

What is my goal?

My goal, because I'm the person writing this, is to reach out to the disaffected young men, giving them some avenue other than the man-o-sphere. That's more important creating a perfect approach. I'd rather pull as many men out, before they get there, while it's easy, than later, when it's harder and more difficult to reach them.

So, what exactly is the issue? The issue is promises. I got all those promises when I was a young man, both over and implied, when I was a young man. All those promises said that I would come out on top and have all the girls. Instead, I didn't get that life. I had to revise who I was and how I approached my relationships, and did this multiple times.

These promises and dreams are fed into young men by the media, by stories written to cater to them, and so being so digestable, they take in those stories. 

There's nothing special or unique about this. Women do the same with their own stories, and they face similar challenges. This is our gender modeling, how we come to understand ourselves as our genders in our society. However, we are not perfect embodiments of this gender modeling, so past a point, we each go our own way, revising and rediscovering our gender as we go.

This arena, where things are bursting apart, seems most prominent between 18 and 28, right in the turmoil years that we see. Taking our stories into the real world, our suppositions meet reality.

It should be no surprise that there's lots of emotion running about here, as there should be. It's appropriate to see disappointment, frustration, anger, annoyance, irritation, bitterness, doubts, uncertainties, and desires. These are natural and appropriate emotions that take time and effort to work through. 

The dating world is an especially complicated machine, and it's lack of safety equipment guarantees that somebody's always going to get chewed up and spit out, men and women equally. If Reddit has taught me anything, it's that no gender has a lock on shitty behavior. 

With all that, it's easy to wind up in a bad place, and there's no easy way out. A bit of cheer and optimism doesn't cut it. The solution is working on ourselves as people and hoping that we get lucky. There's no glory in that.

The man-o-sphere promises that easy out, the firm direction, those simple things that you can do that will matter, and that will make you matter. The man-o-sphere is successful because they offer the actionable, the implementable, and the achievable. They won't just give you directions, they'll help you feel manly, not just be manly.

They offer emotional crack, and that's genuinely hard to counter.

So we also have a second issue with the man-o-sphere, the exit plan. How do we extract people from that crack, that addiction?

I'll give you one proposition: victim blaming doesn't work. Those who are part of the man-o-sphere are mostly victims of it's shysters, being used for their money, and in exchange, they're further divided from all their support systems.

I wish that I could offer so easy way to fix all this, but I can't. All that I can do, I hope, is offer somewhere to begin.