@Thenomain said in What Do You Collect?:
Slang, current and out-dated, plus their origins if at all possible.
Swell. Perhaps even, phat.
@Faceless said in What Do You Collect?:
Spores, molds, and fungus.
Cool! Pictures or specimens? I'm more focused on mosses and lichens but these things are all interesting.
@WTFE said in What Do You Collect?:
Wind instruments.
Modular analog synthesizer equipment and vintage analog synths in general, for me. Though I do have a special place in my heart for toy pianos and ocarinas. (no, not a Zelda reference. I had a character once that took ocarinas where-ever she went...)
Hard liquors.
I'm more focused on certain kinds of craft brew beer and rare bottles from distant lands, though none of it hangs around long as I tend to drink it. I have a de facto hard liquor collection-- not because I like it, but I suppose because I don't like it.
Tea paraphernalia.
Teas.
Yes. Fair bit of coffee stuff too, though that tends to be more utilitarian.
Microcontroller unit development boards.
...I'm nodding guiltily here. My desk is buried under layers of Arduinos, Pis, Xilinx dev boards, LED part reels, various power supplies half wired up, armies of prototyping boards, and a small colony of Russian Nixie tubes that I swear is self-reproducing.
@surreality said in What Do You Collect?:
Stories, whenever possible. (Hokey as fuck? Yes, but still true.)
Well, if my Kindle counts... Or before that, various mountains of odd fanfiction. Reading is one of my biggest vices.
Vintage and antique precious metal threads and embellishments for embroidery.
I actually have metal thread! ...But it's modern, and conductive, and designed for wiring up wearable electronics. I do have 3 sewing machines though. (One modern, Pfaff, two antique, Singer) And a Pfaff serger. And an embroidery machine I've been meaning to work with; found lots of need specs on the control code formatting so that I can make computer-controlled stuff with it in fractal shapes and so on.
Ball jointed dolls (on major long-term hiatus because so, so very broke these days).
Those are interesting, but more my sister's thing. She used to get together with friends and shoot scenes of them having teaparties and so forth. Very elaborate, very pretty, and a good deal more complicated than I remember dolls being.
Unfinished game wikis. (No comment.)
Heh. Yeah, I know how that goes.
Costume and fashion history books.
Architecture, for me.
@HorrorHound said in What Do You Collect?:
Firearms and animal skulls, specifically those able to be arted up by my brother.
Well, firearms... but they are kinda expensive so I probably won't be getting more. Also, I live in California where the laws are getting increasingly absurd, so it's just not worth the headache. I've got a Ruger GP-161 (blued 6" revolver in .357 magnum that looks straight out of the old west) and an M1A (civilian M14, with Leuopold scope). Fond memories though. It was a hobby I got into because guns were scary and I try to address fear by learning.
@Misadventure said in What Do You Collect?:
Roleplaying games.
Yep. Way too many paper books, way way too many PDFs. But I do still refer back to them now and then.
Reference books for role playing game design.
My people~ :cephalopod fist bump:
Steam games I won't play.
I'm getting better about that, but yes it's a problem.
Decks of playing cards.
I've thrown out most of mine, finally, as they weren't all that special. I used to grab a deck when traveling, and then keep part of the airline ticket in the box with them. Ultimately it became a way to hold on to bitter memories with cheap cardboard, which seems unproductive.
Tarot decks.
Now that I respect a great deal more-- the art that goes into those is amazing.
@ThatGuyThere said in What Do You Collect?:
And while I don't really call it a collection since I mainly got them when I was working at a factory and allowed to listen to head phones on the job, so spent 40 hours a week listening to music. I have a metric crap ton of CDs, mostly punk and ska, with some other stuff thrown in.
My music tastes are very different, but I still ended up with stacks of CDs. I finally broke down and put them into binders and threw out all the cases and papers; at this point I only need them for re-ripping to new audio formats. (I know, I know, I should have my whole collection in FLAC by now but I've been lazy)
@Sunny said in What Do You Collect?:
Shot glasses.
For me, it was having been to a party event where we took shots out of STYROFOAM CUPS. This was the ultimate indignity, and I vowed never again.
@Tyche said in What Do You Collect?:
Mud code
<3!
Really I collect a lot of other sorts of old code, and I'm fond of emulation software as a means of describing obsolete hardware. Primarily for me that means computer emulators, and ideally of antique mainframe and minicomputer type things. I had a blast (hey @Thenomain there's another one) setting up SIMH for PDP-10 and going through the old MIT-ITS tape archives from their evacuation off the 36bit platform. Cultural relevance here: PDP-10 and its quirky assembly language (with MIDAS assembler) was the original home of MUDDLE and Colossal Cave adventure and so on. Infocom wrote all their text adventures on a company PDP-10 with MUDDLE and related technologies; the Z-Machine VM target they made was to ease porting off that to home systems...
Seriously though, putting together configs to run a 1970s era machine based on a 1960s design with tape archives taken from early 1990s when they finally powered off the last of them... it was an amazing rush. I love digging though that old stuff, looking at notes left behind by various people in their homedirs and so on ranting about this and that. It's also a means of getting in touch with my roots; I'm a die-hard Emacs user, and that was the machine that gave us TECO (which is a horror), and the Editor MACroS that went along with it. Taking these ancient dusty archives, firing up EMACS and finding you basically can control everything just fine because the UI hasn't changed significantly since the late 60s is a special sort of heaven for me. Also, dropping into the #emacs channel on freenode and saying,
<lucca> Hey guys.
<lucca> EMACS Editor, version 162 - type Help(^_H) for help.
...and watching the boggle and ask if it was a VAX or what, that was good fun.
Dust
It is a war that never ceases until we lose.
@Thenomain said in What Do You Collect?:
That reminds me: Paraphernalia from places I used to work, sometimes as a reminder that even McDonald's would be a better job.
I have really bad hoarder tendencies, but sometimes even I can finally bring myself to let things go. One of the first cases of this for me was when my company was cleaning out and shutting down the Tarzana office, and there were a bunch of boxes of equipment that the Boss said, "Yeah, take any of that or throw it out."
It was like Christmas, at first-- but one box in particular shines out in my memory as the breaking point when I finally REALIZED with crystal clarity that I don't need to keep everything. I opened, peered inside, and struggled. Ultimately though, I decided that a cardboard box PACKED with VESA local bus token ring cards was not going to be a useful thing for me to keep.
All that aside...
In the last few years I've been collecting Tiffany style lamps and blue printed china plates. ...I'm turning into my grandmother.
But more central to the core set of ideas about what makes me ME-- I have an increasingly large collection of octopus paraphernalia including various prints neatly framed and lots of adorable stuffed/knitted/etc octopus toys. And shirts. 
