geekent’s stuff’n things

I’ve been thinking that I’ve skirted around the intent of Buy Nothing Year with my finagling of trade and credit at the shoppe. The point of this year was to leave the new stuff revisit the old stuff, and while some progress and effort has been made in that regard, I still don’t think I’m doing it properly… or rather, doing the BNY concept justice. I mean, I come out of the comic book shoppe every week with two or three new floppies and 2/3rds of the time with a trade paperback or original graphic novel, and I shouldn’t be reading all that. Instead I should be pulling things off the shelf at home and giving them the twice- or thrice-over.
Alas, I still find myself in the Wednesday cycle, and I’m still grabbing regular titles, even going back and picking more that I already had dropped because I have the capability to do so. My intent was for the store credit to be used solely for review materials, but that’s not the case, as I keep dipping into books I don’t review or won’t review again for some time.
In part I think it’s reviewing for Rack Raids that’s making it difficult for me to separate myself from the weekly sojourn and amassing of books. I mean, I was planning with going to the shoppe with Aden anyway just to see what’s out and really to assess what I’m missing, but there’ll be so little that I will miss if I don’t stop picking everything up. Aden also enables by picking up some of the titles I dropped, because she likes reading them too. I just hope that she feels comfortable enough to drop those books when she’s not enjoying them instead of getting them on my behalf.
Anyway, I just feel I haven’t been revisiting enough of the things I’m supposed to be revisiting. I got a couple books around Christmas that I’m working my way through (I’m a slow prose reader), and going to the theatre or renting DVDs takes away from the revisiting of the stuff on my shelf. On top of that I haven’t finished my lists of discards from my collections yet… with the comics and DVDs it’ll be a little easier as I can pretty much look at a title and know I don’t want it anymore. The CDs are going to take some more attention than that. Connections to music are a lot different than connections to stories. Were I a more intellectual man with more time on my hands I’d probably explore why.
The good news is that Aden and I traded in a whole bunch of comics for store credit recently, meaning she’s not spending any money on comics now either. As a result our combined total spending on comics for the year of 2008 so far is a whopping $22 (appx.), which, as you might guess, is usually half what I’d spend in a week. The great thing is that figure will remain pretty stagnant for a long, long time (I have to wonder how long). That store credit is separate, btw, from the store credit I earned, and is under Adrienne’s sole control, to be spent at her discretion, although I do get to influence it a little. I need to remember my original endeavour of stretching out that work-in-trade store credit money for as long as possible, meaning I need to look at cutting back again, dropping the titles I don’t review and sticking to review-only books like I meant to be doing.

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The first new comic book day (NCBD) of 2008 hit on Friday (as opposed to its usual Wednesday because of the holidays), and while it was supposed to be the the first NCBC of Buy Nothing Year, thus my first week in a very long time without getting my weekly fix, I managed to stave off the expected symptoms of withdrawal, thanks to an XMas gift of store credit from my lovely wife (I think it was a somewhat self-serving on her part as she was a concerned that I’d no longer go with her to the store on NCBD, a ritual of ours since the day we met).
It’s one hundred dollars of store credit, which, for me, won’t go very far (especially not when I acquire a quartet of action figures with it last week and have, after two weeks, already blown more than half of it). I have an expensive habit. NCBDs for the foreseeable future will still be open to me, since I’m helping with store inventory in exchange for credit on Monday. I’ve asked about possible additional opportunities where I might be able to acquire more credit, but from the looks of things, the well is going to be dry until the August Fan Expo.
I’m trying to decide how best to utilize the credit. Should I just be business as usual, and pick up what I’d normally pick up every week until it’s gone? If I do, then it’s going to disappear rapidly and then it’s a long, dry road until August. I think I have a plan though… it’s called restraint.
Since I have invested so much in helping build Rack Raids over the years, obtaining material for review for as long as possible should be my altruistic objective. While I’d like to keep getting the books I enjoy (but don’t review for, well, lack of anything fresh to say about them) I think picking up “books of interest” for the purpose of review should be core.
There’s also a half-dozen mini-series and storylines I started reading before BNY began, so I’m also going to finish acquiring those (for review as well, of course), but other than that, I’m avoiding my routine purchasing. I’ve been given a bit of a reprieve, in a manner of speaking, so I need to be smarth, thrifty, and determined.