Geek Roots

       

        I wont go to much into my fandom of Star Wars in this article but will save that for the future. Like most people my age I was a big fan of Ninja Turtles when I was a kid. My earliest Christmas memory is being handed a box by my parents that didn't look like a box shaped like any of the toy boxes I has seen in the stores. I remember not being excited to open the box. Once I did though to my surprise it was full of all the Ninja Turtles toys at the time. It had Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Shredder, Casey Jones, Bebop, and Rocksteady. I remember jumping up and down excitedly and seeing my parents smiling. Since I am the oldest  Child I just missed transformers but I soon moved onto the Marvel heroes courtesy of the great X-Men and Spider-Man cartoon series of the 90's. I also can't forget to mention a VHS tape my friend had that featured the pilot episode for the unmade X-Men series the Pryde of the X-Men which was the inspiration for the arcade classic X-Men game  

        These soon led into collecting Marvel action figures. We would always buy the at the now deduct KB Toy store which would often have deals for 3 figures for 9.99. These action figures ended up leading to the biggest money sink I've experienced in nerddom, card collecting. Back then most of the action figures in the Marvel toy lines came with a trading card from the card sets. There were a lot of card sets coming from Marvels (partnership) with Fleer Ultra. Our favorite though was Over Power card game. This game was fantastic as we soon unleashed out favorite heroes and villains in epic battles. This game had a lot of longevity amongst our group of friends and even featured sets with DC characters as well as the characters from a image comics.  We played and collected these cards for years even after they became defunct. A big factor in this was my friends father collected them with us. He would order a box of boosters from a supplier every once in awhile and then would sell us the packs for the cost he paid. This extended to whatever kind of cards we wanted him to order for us. 
Eventually the toy collecting died out amongst us and with the lack of new Marvel card sets being released and that cancellation I soon moved onto other things primarily video games and Magic the Gathering which I had played on occasion shortly after the original release of the game. We soon frequented the local tournament scene.  Magic while an enjoyable game in itself is very costly to play at tournaments. Essentially you are forced to keep buying new cards when old sets get cycled out of eligibility for Wizards of the Coast sanctioned tournaments. I kept this going for several years of spending hundreds of dollars on the new card set I soon grew weary of the cost to keep playing. 
The reason for stating that card collecting is more expensive than video games is for the simple reason that I almost always get more hours of enjoyment from a video games then I do from stack of cards of equivalent cost. Most cards remain unused and sit in boxes gathering dust. I'm sure I have spent more time playing Halo Combat Evolved than I did with fifty dollars of Magic cards. There were years especially in the late 2000's where I spent much more on games than cards but I feel I got a better value from the games. 
        

        Since 2006 I have played Blizzards World of Warcraft off and on. I started sometime before the release of the Burning Crusade. I played very little in BC.  Not really because of time issues though I was a college student at the time. I just did not enjoy that expansion much which I'm sure puts me in a very small minority in the WoW community. I thoroughly enjoyed Wrath of the Litch King and was I raided with the top 25 man guild on my server for much of that expansion. Cataclysm us where I turned to PVP for most of the expansion. My work and school schedule changed pretty drastically during that expansion and I missed hardcore raiding until halfway through the Firelands. I've played pretty hardcore since the relate of Mist of Pandaria which I will get into at a future time I'm sure. 

        For all the love I have for Marvel I didn't get into collecting comics until High School where I was able to but lots of comics for cheap through eBay. I soon had a pull list at my local comic store which was over 20 miles away. I collected comics for more than ten years and have lots of long boxes filled with comics. The last couple years however the price of comics have at least to me have become a detriment to their collectibility. I can no longer justify the cost. Most issues cost 4.99 or more. I continued to collect some comics that we're released by Top Cow Comics since the price stayed the same. I didn't so much stop buying the comics because I wasn't interested but more because I stopped going to the comic store. I have found some cost saving ways to enjoy comics. There are some websites that sell new comics for cheaper than a comic store will offer and leave the buyers with great deals such as DCBS . Now my favorite alternative to the in store comic book scene has become graphic novels which I generally purchase through amazon. Most graphic novels have 5-6 issues which would be 25-30 dollars plush tax if bought individually. These can be purchased in a graphic novel form for often half the price, contain no ads aside from other books being published by the same company, and often have extras like sketches and interviews included. 

        I'm sure I left some things out from my geek cred but there is only so much I feel I can mention before it all becomes a giant wall of text and at some point I will write about my experience with Star Wars and more video gaming.