Love Alan Turing but the coin is a complete waste of time.
It doesn’t really matter, but I had a discussion recently with a friend who does YouTube videos. He collects coins primarily, although he also collects some stamps and we were talking about our individual interests. I knew it would cause consternation, but I said it anyhow.
I’m really not impressed with the way a lot of people collect coins.
One person doing that in the stamp world is The Digital Philatelist. So let’s see where he keeps making such a fool of himself.
This came up today when someone asked a simple question about paid GMs in RPGs. Why do people pay for them? What’s the deal? It was a very easy question, one that apparently, there are no easy answers to.
Worse, of course, all of the paid GMs freaked the hell out and started screaming that they were being oppressed, because that’s always a thing these days.
But the question remains: why would anyone pay for such a thing? So let’s talk about it.
This is a sad state of affairs, when people can’t even come to grips with the problem at hand. It came up earlier today when, in a discussion, I brought up the fact that it is virtually impossible to get modern worldwide stamps from dealers anymore. Nearly the past 30 years of stamps are a gigantic black hole with very few exceptions. If we can’t count on stamp dealers to keep supplying collectors, this hobby is going nowhere but down.
And I was surprised how many people got upset at the idea!
I know that virtually nobody reads this blog, mostly because I never advertise it, so perhaps I’m just talking to myself, but I’ve been thinking lately and I wanted to see what others thought, if anyone ever sees this at all.
First though, I need to talk about YouTube and that might also spawn another entirely separate post about YouTube stamp channels and my thoughts on them specifically, but for now, we’ll just talk generally.
See me below the fold for more.
If anyone has been out in the world of stamp collecting lately, you’ll know that there’s been a lot of talk about modern post offices putting out NFTs of their stamps. It’s very limited at the moment and thankfully so, it’s desperately trying to make money by doing anything but the actual job that the post offices exist to do.
What else is new, right? But here’s why this isn’t a part of philately, even though there are a few voices that are adamant that it is. Here is why they are simply wrong.
There’s always a lot of talk in the hobby about recruiting new stamp collectors and I’ve never really had anyone that I could encourage. My kids, as I’ve said before, they were both born without the collector gene and they aren’t interested in collecting anything. Nobody else I know cares. It was only very recently that I finally found someone who showed a little interest and…
Well, read on and see why this isn’t turning out well.
I recently had an extended conversation with a couple of other philatelists and the subject was how we could get young kids interested in collecting stamps. A lot of things were suggested and eventually, the discussion rolled around to how we got involved, back in the day.
I told my story, but I admitted that my path in wasn’t one that anyone could ever follow today. It’s a shame but the world has changed to such a degree that people back when I got started, our stories can almost certainly never be repeated.
But I’ll pass it along anyhow, just in case anyone has any ideas.
This has come up in discussions a couple of times of late and I thought that I would put my thoughts down in one place, once and for all, because I’d rather have somewhere to point people to if they’re curious, rather than having to go over the same ground time and time again.
I’m really dissatisfied with modern social media when it comes to the things that I do. Here’s why and here’s what I’d like to see instead. If anyone has any ideas where I can go for these things, I’m all ears.
There’s a sub over on Reddit called r/askastampcollector and the only thing it ever gets used for, virtually always in fact, is people just show up with stamps that they found or inherited or they were given, looking for a big paycheck.
It doesn’t work that way and a lot of them get positively upset when they receive the news that what they have is worthless, but honestly, can we just stop worrying about value when it comes to collectibles? You people are going about it all wrong!
