151 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
151 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
[1]skip to main content
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[2] [logo]
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• [3]Archives
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• [5]About
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• [6]More...
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Junk Contemplations
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10 May 2025
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The coffee table is spilled with Playmobil figures, a dirty towel, a simple
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wooden dollhouse, an undressed doll, and a purple teddy bear wearing diapers
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the wrong side up sitting in an empty plastic ice cream container. To my left
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of the couch, a dolphin plush is chilling next to a pile of assorted picture
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books. To my right, an elephant plush wearing a scarf is catching some z’s. All
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of these things hurt my eyes, even though this has more or less been the state
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of stuff in our home for the past two years. I just can’t get used to it,
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something keeps on urging me to clean up, and I indeed have the feeling that
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that is exactly what I do all day long every single day—without much success.
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I make my way through the house to the new home office downstairs while kicking
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aside a few more randomly placed toys—both the toddler’s as well as the dog’s.
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After emptying and moving the IKEA BILLY bookcases, I had another cleanup cramp
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and threw a random array of mediocre books in a couple of bags to donate to the
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thrift store nearby. The shelves were roomy for exactly one week. After that,
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we had to consolidate another bookshelf, more children’s books leaked into the
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home office, and the cramp returned. It is itching badly. Yet it did not stop
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me from ordering more books.
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A month ago, I couldn’t open the drawer beneath the TV stand that stores my
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Nintendo Switch games. Oh hi cramp, how are you? Not good? No? Let’s do this
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together then! Only thirty minutes later, I had sold nine of them on Vinted, a
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European online second hand marketplace. But there be dragons! The last time I
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did something rash like that to a video game collection dear and near to my
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heart, I heavily regretted the action afterwards. You know, that GameCube Fire
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Emblem: Radiant Dawn for €10 that’s now worth €150 kind of regret.
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Back in the home office, a naked wall urged me to drive off to IKEA and get one
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of those five by five KALLAX storage shelves. Somehow, it seemed like a good
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idea. I could move my board games from the hallway to make space for more junk
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for the kids and I had more room to buy more stuff for myself! Yay! Wait a
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minute, more stuff ultimately means more cleanup itches resulting in sudden
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outbursts of throwaway-rage. It looks like all I do is pester myself by wanting
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and getting more junk which all contribute to a restless instead of a calm
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mind. Why do I do this?
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I used to think that I was pretty immune to the whole “fear of missing out”
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hype. It turns out that I’m not. I hate the philosophy of Limited Run Games,
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yet my last order probably won’t be my last (hello Gex Trilogy). I don’t like
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BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list, constantly teasing you to go off and buy new
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games instead of properly learning to understand the mechanics of the ones you
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already have, yet somehow I’m easily convinced by friends influenced by the
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very same list to bring home new stuff anyway.
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The junk that hurts my eyes is not just the junk of the kids. It’s also my own.
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That is coming from a man who read and deeply respects Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye,
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Things; is a regular listener of The Minimalists; and frequently picks a fight
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with his wife about how disorderly she dares to chuck her clothes into the
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wardrobe. Somehow, somewhere, the sense of it all seems to have gotten lost. In
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my defence: The Minimalist guys and Fumio Sasaki don’t have kids. Marie Kondo
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didn’t have any and now that she does, she’s dialling back on the cleanup
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magic. See what I did there? I tried to hide my own urge to collect junk by
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placing someone else’s junk front and centre. Oops.
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I tried to optimize the new home office space by jamming in as much as I could.
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But two old computers next to the modern workstation in front of a window felt
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too messy to comfortably be and work in so I am temporarily forced to tear down
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and store the Windows 98 Athlon and Windows XP Core2Duo setup. Not even a KVM
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switch would have saved the day here. Yet a new problem arose: since we have
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neither basement nor attic, we don’t even have the space to properly store
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stuff like this. And no way in hell am I going to let go of these machines.
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While attempting to make room in the wardrobe (simply because that’s the
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largest closet we have), I found an old 12" CRT tube and more old computer junk
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stuffed in there “just in case”. I guess these can go… Yes, that last sentence
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was typed with a sense of reluctance.
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All these junk contemplations do not help in calming the spirit. If anything,
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that spirit is triggered and working overtime right now. More junk needs to be
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moved across the house because of a renovation and more runs to IKEA need to be
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made because of an upcoming family expansion. Yup, we made it worse.
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Perhaps I need to kill off the music CD collection, even though that one is
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quite modest. That smaller case could be replaced by another BILLY extension.
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And it’s been years since I last touched that Evercade, who even has that many
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handheld gaming devices anyway? On to the get-rid-of list it goes. But wait,
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are you sure? Are you sure? [7]Are you sure?
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Meanwhile, those empty KALLAX holes beckon: now that I do have the space to
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store more board games, perhaps it’s time to re-read that wanted list…
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[8]braindump [9]stuff [10]collecting
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You Might Also Like...
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• [11]The Challenge Of Buying Games At Physical Stores 06 Jun 2024
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• [12]Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media 25 Sep 2023
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• [13]Is Collecting Physical Games Worth It (Part III) 29 Oct 2022
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• [14]Double-dipping and Market Prices 05 Jul 2021
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• [15]Flea Market Season 22 Jun 2021
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Bio and Support
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[avatar2024]
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I'm [16]Wouter Groeneveld, a Brain Baker, and I love the smell of freshly baked
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thoughts (and bread) in the morning. I sometimes convince others to bake their
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brain (and bread) too.
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If you found this article amusing and/or helpful, you can support me via [17]
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PayPal or [18]Ko-Fi. I also like to hear your feedback via [19]Mastodon or
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email. Thanks!
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JavaScript is disabled. I use it to obfuscate my e-mail, keeping spambots at
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bay.
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Reach me using: [firstname] at [this domain].
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↑ [20]Top | [21]Archives | [22]RSS Feed | [23]bv | [24]© CC BY 4.0 License.
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[25] [brainbakin]
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References:
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[1] https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/#top
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[2] https://brainbaking.com/
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[3] https://brainbaking.com/archives/
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[4] https://brainbaking.com/works/
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[5] https://brainbaking.com/about
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[6] https://brainbaking.com/more
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[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNY6ZstdUdY
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[8] https://brainbaking.com/categories/braindump
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[9] https://brainbaking.com/tags/stuff
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[10] https://brainbaking.com/tags/collecting
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[11] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/06/the-challenge-of-buying-games-at-physical-stores/
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[12] https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/09/overlooked-reasons-to-still-buy-physical-media/
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[13] https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/10/is-collecting-physical-games-worth-it-part-iii/
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[14] https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/07/double-dipping-and-market-prices/
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[15] https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/06/flea-market-season/
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[16] https://brainbaking.com/about
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[17] https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=R2WTKY7G9V2KQ
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[18] https://ko-fi.com/woutergroeneveld
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[19] https://dosgame.club/@jefklak
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[20] https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/#top
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[21] https://brainbaking.com/archives
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[22] https://brainbaking.com/index.xml
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[23] https://brainbaking.com/bv
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[24] https://brainbaking.com/copyright-and-tracking-policy
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[25] https://brainbaking.com/links
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