What fascinating things do you collect?

I collect:
keychains - most seem to be presents from people that have places they have visited on them or have my name on them
picture frames - I love strange ones
piggy banks - my favorite is the moose one I got from Maine
anything Asian - I have japanese rice bowls with dragon motif & chopsticks, a kimono, jade carvings, dragons, etc.
novelty clocks

I used to collect:
poison dart frogs
concert shirts & ticket stubs

Years back I was huge into tropical fish. I owned a large number of freshwater tanks, including a 125 gallon that was six feet long.

I like to collect interesting postcards of places I visit. I decorate my walls with them and they're a nice keepsake, plus look cool. I also do that bachelor thing where I fill all the various ledges of my house with empty beer bottles of interesting beers I've had, but I'm not really attached to those so have no problem tossing them when the time comes.

Video games and Transformers.

I used to have a lot of other mish-mash of things, but sold off nearly all of them to focus only on Transformers and video games. Those are expensive enough on their own.

I collect soccer scarves and Living Dead Dolls, and I also used to collect militaria.

This thread would be much more fun if pictures were provided.

Metal shirts. I have roughly 300. Highlights include a Cynic-Focus tourshirt, Blind Guardian 91-98 tourshirts (many lovely Marschall designs), first two Flotsam shirts, Annihilator (same), Forbidden Evil tourshirt, Malevolent Creation - Retribution original, Dark Angel - Time Does Not Heal tourshirt, several Sacred Reich (Stottler rules!), several Beneath/Arise era Sepultura (Whelan rules!), Cause of Death shirts, No More Color, Mental Vortex era Coroner, Pestilence - Testimony tourshirt (Seagraves rules!), Death Human to Symbolic tourshirts, Bolt Thrower - Warmaster era, good Metallica stuff, Overkill - Horrorscope, King Diamond - Conspiracy tourshirt (original artwork) and the original The Eye shirt, Morgana Lefay - Maleficium, Psychotic Waltz shirts (first two tourshirts, brilliant shit) and many more. It's a decent collection but there are people who have ridiculous collections both in size and in quality (underground gems etc).

Some of my collection on tshirtslayer

I collect coins, bills, cds, and pins among others. These are my most notable collections, with my first three being the biggest. I've collected coins for a while and I gathered up all the coin pocket pages but I'm too lazy to put my coins inside them. My CD collection has really grown for a while and it's my main focus atm.

Apart from physical media, I collect rock crystals. Was recently told that a Japanese guy whom I invited to my place for lunch has since nicknamed me "crystal boy"

There. That is a small portion of them. They may not look big, but Seaspray is a $10 figure, at the feet of Fortress Maximus, and Fort Max is the biggest ever made, over 2 feet tall. The top is mostly combiners. My camera wasn't great when I took this, but L-R, you have Abominus, Volcanicus (Dinobots), Superion, Menasaur, Bruticus, Computron, Defensor, Sky Reign, and Predacus. The other combiners below are Victorion and Predaking.

The display case is built into the wall and this was taken when we were still finishing some things in the house.

Not so long ago I started collecting postal stamps. It turned out to be so entertaining. I just received new stamps from Israel, I checked postal code through site https://worldpostalcode.com/israel/. There are 30 stamps in my collection, almost all from Europe.

I don't really collect anything for the collections sake. However I buy a lot of books. For many years I had the goal of having read every book that was in my book shelves. I never did but that was the goal. I then heard someone argue that they tried to build their own library with books they would like to read so that when they felt like it they could just go to the book shelf and pick a book. That made more sense to me so that's what I'm doing.

I have four book shelves right now and I have read about 50% of the books I own. The absolute majority being non-fictional stuff usually dealing with philosophy, religious traditions and political ideologies. Smaller sections include the historical books, the biographies and of course fiction (usually older fiction that is regarded as classic or in some way important - rarely, if ever, new releases or stuff that's in the charts).

They just announced the pre-order for the new Masterpiece Optimus Prime today.

$450. Fucking cocksuckers.

There's no way I'll ever be able to justify that much money. I will never own a Masterpiece OP. My life is fucked.

When I worked at a grocery store in an immigrant-heavy area, people knew my cash was the unofficial foreign currency exchange. Want to unload a pocketful of change, and you’re not sure it’s all Canadian? No problem! Many coins from many countries look and feel similar to something Canadian, so I would swap it out from my own pocket later.
So five years of that led to me amassing quite a haul of rubles, Euros, UAE dinars, Norwegian krone, yen, yuan, Bulgarian lev, several thousand Lebanese pounds, even a 50 chhetrum from Bhutan.
(The 2000 Portuguese escudo looks nothing like the Cdn $20 someone tried to pass it off as, but I didn’t care. Had to have it!)

I collect pounds and bad memories.



I don't know. I have more beer glasses than I use in any given 12 month period, so I suppose that counts. If aging beer counts as a collection, count me in, though I don't add many bottles to that anymore (partly due to moving around too much, and partly because after 8 years of experimentation I've narrowed down what I like to keep around).

I don't really consider books and albums a "hobby."

Living in the US, it always sucks when you get Canadian coins from vending machines- because they won't accept Canadian coins, but they will happily dispense them in change. And one time, someone gave me a quarter they thought was one of those state quarters, it said "Barbados" and they presumably thought, as did I, that Barbados was a U.S territory like (for example) Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. But it's not- it's a foreign country with it's own independent government, and their quarter happens to be the same size as a U.S or a Canadian one. So, I've still got it, it's just sitting around in my change drawer.

I do have a small collection of old US copper cents from the 1800s and even a couple from the late 1700s, because I find them interesting from a historical perspective. I'm not really a big time coin collector though- its too much of a drain on the old budget. On E-Bay for example, if you happen to want a copper cent dated 1793- (first year of the national U.S. Mint) it will cost you over two thousand dollars- and that's just for a really crappy, corroded, fucked up one. A 1793 cent in decent shape is worth tens of thousands of dollars- lets just say I would rather buy a lot of metal merch, and go to a lot of metal shows, for that kind of money than spend it on one trinket.

My dad and my eldest brother are avid collectors of just about anything to the point of "a psychiatrist should look into that" and I try to take my lessons from that. So every time I catch myself unwittingly amassing heaps of useless crap, I toss it all out and curse my genes. It happens about once a month on average so I curse a lot.

The masterpiece figures are extremely detailed and impressive, but yeah, they're super expensive. I have zero of them. I still want Starscream, Shockwave, and Dinobot (Beast Wars). The Dinobot one is just incredible. This Optimus Prime one is hilarious, as it comes with a Starscream head for when he dressed up as Prime ha ha!

I generally stick with the adult-targeted lines, which have just been getting better every year. But will occasionally branch out if I just want figures of certain characters, Starscream, Shockwave, Hound, Wheeljack, for instance.

I think saying "collect for collections sake" kind of misses the point. People collect things because they enjoy the "thing" and have an emotional connection them. But there are a lot of facets to this beyond just "the collection."

For instance, in collecting video games, often times the search is a big part of it for me. Hitting garage sales and finding some rare gems, or getting a great deal, or feeling like you're rescuing something about to be lost. For instance, my best garage sale find this year (probably ever) was 2 Atari 2600's (4-switch versions), 60ish 2600 games, an original model Sega Master System and 13 boxed games, plus a pile of controllers for both, for $100.

For me, getting to experience and have the old games matters. Being able to play the classics in their original, intended form. I spent hours cleaning and detailing all of these and reading up on some of the games to learn more. I had not heard of Golvellius before I picked it up that day. There's a real passion here that is what drives me. I love the history of it all.

I'm not interested in the supposed "financial value" of these things. I'm not a fucking moron. I know this isn't going to be a retirement account like too many "collectors" seem to think while they artificially inflate prices. They don't care about the history or the hardware, they don't have a passion for it, they just some future payday, and like all markets even this will bottom-out at some point. These people are just setting themselves up for a day when they look at all they amassed and they dump it for cheap just to get rid of it, so their big payday will amount to nothing.

So, I think collecting is something people do outside of just amassing random stuff (that's hoarding), as there is a deep interest, an emotional connection, an organized methodology, a lot of time spent learning about it, etc. Not everyone does it just as not everyone plays MMOs. And that's fine.

I never watched Beast Wars and haven't seen it readily available on any streaming service, so I don't have love for it. I'm always shocked when I hear huge Transformers fans like Beast Wars even more than G1. Blows my small mind.

I might have to give up and start buying KOs. Takara are pricing me right out of this. I was PISSED yesterday when they announced that price tag. It's ridiculous. I've read MP-10 was around $200 when it first was released which is still a ton of money for a toy, but I can justify that much on a once in a lifetime purchase of a beloved childhood character.

I'm sure many have an invested interest in their collection. And its obvious that the value isn't always, or even often, monetary. But I tend to come across people who collect meaningless things like refrigerator magnets or coca cola glasses from McDonalds (to have one in every colour!). And I have a hard time thinking there is much emotional or monetary value in that. One refrigerator magnet for each place visited abroad is fine but when people collect "cute refrigerator magnets" without any sort of selection or reasoning I think they collect just for collections sake.

There might be people like that, that seems perfectly reasonable. But to assume they don't have some emotional attachment to them for whatever reason is something you cannot rationally assume. Just as it would be unfair to assume that people who collect nothing have no personalities or are uninteresting because they have nothing to define their lives. They just have different things that they enjoy or have that define who they are.

This seems to be a fallacy of "I don't do this, therefore I don't understand how anyone else could be."

I listed a simple, over-simplified reason for collecting: An emotional connection to some capacity. But the reasons people collect are no doubt as varied as the things people like to collect.

A more interesting way to look at this would be to ask why someone indulges in a certain thing than to assume none of them make any sense or that everyone is doing it for the same totally flat reason. As noted, emotion is a big part of this, and not always rational, which might make for even more interesting explanations.

I don't know the quality of straight KO figures, but I have seen some third party ones, as in unlicensed figures. It may look like Bruticus, and be made out of a team that looks like the Combaticons, and in your mind it's Bruticus, but it's name is Warbotron--and it costs more than an official Hasbro figure. It costs more because of two things: A serious amount of higher detail and sometimes bigger size, but also a much, much smaller market which reduces the profit margin.

I get your pain, on that though, which is why my shopping tends to be rather selective.

Beast Wars is a great series. Is it better than G1? That depends on what capacity. In straight writing, it is frequently better because the lore had been ironed out by then, but Beast Wars also tied directly back to G1 in the original narrative (I don't know about the Japanese BW spin-offs). The animation was good for the time, but has aged noticeably. But then, so has the original G1 cartoon, which is frequently ridiculous. The number of times Bumblebee was drawn human-sized on that show is probably too high to count.

I've been told Transformers Prime is outstanding as well, but have not seen it yet. So I can't tell you which of those is better. They're all better than the Bay movies.

This is outside of collecting and more of a TF blab:

I was simply pointing out some of the collectors that I have come across. And I want to make clear that its not a matter of "not understanding how anyone else could collect x" just a reflection that some do not really attach that much emotion to each separate piece in their collection. And I'd like think that the more common a thing is, the more unique, the more emotional attachment people find in it.

Again, I know of people who collect refrigerator magnets. Nothing more specified than that and these magnets are everywhere to be bought. I doubt there is the same attachment to that as it can be for something that is truly rare, an old stamp with a specific postmark from a country not existing anymore (to be overly specific), or when there is a goal of some sort (like completing a whole toy line or something alike).

You are right in that it is interesting to ask the question "why". I just think some collectors tend to lean more to the hoarding side of things.

Oh, I don't doubt some people tend towards "hoarding" instead of "collecting." I have this friend in the UK who is also a game collector, and we've talked about this stuff a lot ha ha. It's something we both hold near and dear because of a fascination with the hardware, the history, and everything associated with that. We are both equally disgusted by people who call themselves collectors who care little or nothing for the gaming and only for dollar signs. When I was a kid, I also collected baseball cards, but got burned out on it when I suddenly cared about the money more than anything else. Then the industry pretty much crashed precisely because it was feeding that culture, so good timing on those geniuses.

Yeah, maybe refrigerator magnets sound silly, because you can get them pretty much anywhere, but at the same time, I can buy regular video games pretty much anywhere these days. And if I hold onto a game for long enough, it's become a collectible simply because of age. I can buy Transformers at a large number of retailers. To some people, these are just empty escapism or silly kid's toys, respectively. I wouldn't make assumptions on that fridge magnet person. If they had just boxes of thousands of identical magnets crowded any open space in their home, maybe falling over at some point and crushing a cat to death and wiping out every harddrive in a five mile radius, then I might be concerned that it is something beyond just healthy collecting that makes them happy.

I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

I think its interesting that in the topic title collecting and hobby are conflated, as it puts the focus on acquisition as the activity. Ive been thinking a bit about that lately - my hobby is wargaming, and without tooting my own horn im a good miniature painter. It got out of hand though and recently I sold a lot of stuff off, and found it not as painful to let it go as I might have thought.

So I came to the conclusion that its the development of the skill which I really like rather than having a bunch of stuff. Which is why I always look sideways at hobbies which are about collecting rather than doing something active. And I say that as a 100% certified hoarder by inclination - just one who feels a bit better now hes not shackled by quite so much stuff.

The only collection I'd be interested in developing now (short of being able to afford a big house to out more stuff in) is now prohibitively expensive for someone of my relatively modest means. Militaria of any stamp is just way out of my price range

When I read the above I realized that this might be part of why I don't really look at collecting as something desirables. (1) It (generally) does not develop anything in us. And (2) I know that I have a hard time parting ways with things from my past so my own mindset is to not collect things so I won't get emotionally attached to it (for no substantial reason).

Oh that's a good point. A hobby is more than just collecting. Collecting something is a hobby, but a hobby is not necessarily collecting something.

I also draw comics and write (cough my signature cough self promotion cough). It's a hobby because I make no money at it.

Oh! This is a very interesting thread. Some really neat collections!

Stuff I usually collect are:
-Video games
-Custom art (commissioned from others of characters of mine)
-Stuffed animals/action figures
-Bottles
-Melee weaponry

Hobbies, as probably obvious from above, include:
-Writing
-Drawing (not great at it)
-Character/world building
-Gaming

War Gaming, especially the WarHammer minatures game, is kind of a cool hobby in that you collect and paint the different miniatures from the various armies, and it's also a GAME- a social thing you can do with other people. With that said, I am not a WarHammer guy myself, but I know people that are into that and it's kind of cool being able to admire their collection of miniatures, elaborately painted vehicles and armies, and so on.

Intentionally? Or did you just leave a pizza box under your bed and are now afraid to challenge whatever’s grown in it?

Comic books occasionally. Does that make sense at 40 years old? I am not sure. Batman and Superman. Make mine DC comics all the way. Occasionally Spiderman. Which is marvel comics I know that.

It helps him keep his mind off marshmallows

And the Twinkie. Thing's huge.

And cockroaches big enough to bite your head off, man.

But for me, I collect a lot of things:

1. My music collection right now is devoted toward metal cassettes.

2. I am a huge baseball fan, particularly the Boston Red Sox, and collect cards and books about them.

3. Aliens stuff: books, comics, movies, toys/action figures.

Coins, and soon, historic books about the military. Either in their original language or translated, i don't mind too much.

Pretty dorky, but then collecting most anything is gonna be dorky at heart: these days I'm obsessing over shoes (boots specifically). I'm up to four pairs of really nicely made boots since August last year with a fifth pair on the way. The goodyearwelt subreddit is going to be the death of my wallet. It began with me having to spend so much money on shipping just to get regular ass shoes since I live in a country that doesn't sell shoes big enough for my feet. I got sick of spending nearly the price of the shoes on shipping only to have things fall apart in no time, so I started researching about more durable footwear, got into the whole handmade Pacific Northwest bootmaker scene, and after my first pair I was hooked not only on this stuff but also on well-made things in general. After losing some weight it's gonna spiral into other clothing things for sure.

I'm into collecting novels (classics and modern), as well as films (old and new, foreign and domestic).

Besides my vinyl / cd collection, I used to collect films (specifically the Criterion Collection). I have well over 400 of their titles. However, I haven't purchased one in almost a year-and-a-half. I've been gifted a couple for my birthday and Christmas.
I've even stopped purchasing music. I used to buy around 2-5 records a week. In all of 2018, I purchased four records. I've just been trying to have less STUFF in general, and save money for travel.